In a summer of fatalities on city streets, activists turn spotlight on near misses
Abigail Pugh had just dropped off her 9-year-old daughter at school in Dufferin Grove when she witnessed a near miss.
A driver didn’t see a boy crossing at a pedestrian crosswalk and slammed on the brakes, narrowly avoiding another headline-making tragedy. The experience spurred Pugh to create the hashtag and ensuing campaign #NearMissToronto.
“I just decided there and then that I needed to give people a voice for this kind of event,” she said.
Toronto road users have used the hashtag to share their stories of close calls and near misses. #NearMissToronto has picked up steam on Twitter, with102 uses since Pugh started the campaign six weeks ago, amid a rash of cyclist and pedestrian deaths that have raised concerns about road safety.
“The actual fatality events don’t tell the whole story,” she said. “I figured that it would help journalists and politicians understand the extent of terror on our roads.”
Pugh wants the campaign to amplify the voices of pedestrians and others who feel powerless in the “wild west” of Toronto roads. But she also hopes municipal politicians and Mayor John Tory read people’s stories and are moved to make changes to infrastructure, like changing pedestrian crossings to light signals.
Pugh printed 200 posters promoting the hashtag and stuck them up at crosswalks around her neighbourhood. Some friends did the same. A sign at College and Havelock Sts. asks, “Almost hit by a vehicle at this crosswalk? To share: #NearmissToronto.”
Dozens of tweets and Facebook posts followed, with most of the buzz building up in the past few days.
Twitter Canada said the hashtag’s use peaked on July 6, with 41 mentions in one day.
“This is a sign that it’s not just the fatalities or even the collisions that are going up, but also people’s experiences of these near-misses,” Walk Toronto’s Dylan Reid said.
Because near misses aren’t tracked in any formal capacity, Reid said “it’s really about people’s experience, and I think this hashtag is really valuable insight into people’s experience in Toronto.
“The fatalities and serious injuries that we see are the tip of the iceberg of people’s experience of danger when they’re just trying to walk around the city.”
While intersections and crosswalks should be safe, Reid said people are increasingly finding that they aren’t as safe as they’d like. Aggressive driver behaviour and vehicles stopping within intersections are contributing to the problem, he added.
“Suddenly, what’s supposed to be the safe pedestrian crossing becomes a dangerous one,” Reid said.
Kyle Ashley, a parking enforcement officer with the Toronto police turned road violence reduction advocate, said the hashtag — much like people who once tweeted at him to point out where traffic rules were being broken — shows the community coming together to highlight a problem that could otherwise go unmeasured.
“The biggest similarity is that these are people-powered movements, that are inspiring others to help advocate for safer streets in their own way,” Ashley said in a Twitter conversation with the Star. “It is exciting to see so many people engaged in reimagining how our streets could be.”
In Ashley’s five years as a parking enforcement officer, he witnessed close calls weekly, if not daily.
“This movement of social media advocacy, by so many different parties, has really put this conversation on the forefront of people’s minds,” Ashley said. “These kinds of grassroots movements, like #NearMissToronto, keep the issue alive on the front page, and six-o-clock news.”
In February, Daniel Leao was at the T-shaped intersection at Roselawn and Rosewell Aves., pushing his young son in a stroller.
He began to cross the intersection when a snow plow almost hit the pair.
“When I was crossing, he accelerated against me,” Leao said. Months later, Leao described the incident using the hashtag #NearMissToronto.
Harith Al-Shakarchi used #NearMissToronto on Twitter to recall several incidents. “I’ve been almost hit by cars numerous times as a pedestrian,” AlShakarchi said in an interview.
Once, he was about to cross the intersection at Bathurst St. and Roselawn Ave. “I had almost placed a foot down onto the street when a car zoomed past me (obviously going through a red in the intersec- tion),” Al-Shakarchi tweeted. “I could have been hurt or worse that day.”
“You see these near-misses all the time,” he said in an interview.
While the hashtag was intended to highlight near-misses at pedestrian crosswalks, it’s been used to share incidents involving cyclists, too.
Tim Lindsay tweeted about #NearMissToronto after a vehicle clipped the front wheel of his bike at Queen St. W. and University Ave. on an early weekend morning.
“That’s the closest I’ve come to a really serious collision on the road before,” Lindsay said.
One of the scariest stories Pugh has seen in those posts was one where a crossing guard ended up on the hood of a vehicle near King St. W. and Jameson Ave.
“Pedestrian crossings are no longer a place where a pedestrian can feel safe and I find that deeply sad and angering,” Pugh said.
At her daughter’s age, Pugh was playing outside and walking to school on her own, but she’s too afraid to let her own child do the same.
“It just strikes me as a tipping point where you don’t see kids walking to school on their own anymore and therefore drivers are less careful,” Pugh said. “It’s a perfect storm.”