2020 safest year on the streets in over a decade
Lighter traffic during crisis a boon for cyclists, pedestrians, data show
The first six months of 2020 were the safest for Toronto’s pedestrians and cyclists in more than a decade, according to city data that suggest lower traffic levels during the COVID-19 crisis helped dramatically reduce the number of vulnerable road users seriously hurt and killed on the streets.
From Jan. 1 to July 1, the city counted 63 collisions that resulted in a pedestrian or cyclist being killed or seriously injured. That was the lowest total for the first half of any year since at least 2007, which is as far back as the records go.
The previous low point was in 2014, when 82 pedestrians and cyclists were killed or injured in the first six months of the year. The average from 2007 to 2019 was about 99.
Nancy Smith Lea, director of the Centre for Active Transportation, a Toronto-based nonprofit that advocates for safer streets, said it’s not surprising that fewer pedestrians and cyclists were injured this year while there were fewer drivers on the road.
“There’s this idea that maybe pedestrians are distracted or looking at their phones. (But) clearly when there are no cars, there are no fatalities. And that’s as simple as that,” she said.
The city data show serious pedestrian and cyclist collisions dropped off sharply in April. That coincided with the sudden evaporation of car traffic after the city went into lockdown in mid-March to slow the spread of the virus.
According to the city’s transportation department, car traffic reached a low point around mid-April, when volumes at downtown intersections fell to between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of normal. They’ve since rebounded, but by mid-July were still not back to pre-pandemic levels.
While 2020’s low rate of injury and deaths are undoubtedly good news, Lea said they also reveal how much work Toronto has to do to achieve the goal set out in its $123-million Vision Zero plan, which aims to completely eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries. The city hasn’t come close to that target this year even when aided by an unprecedented decline in car use.
Lea and other road safety advocates say physical changes to streets such as narrowing traffic lanes, reducing curb turning radii, and providing physically separated facilities for bikes are the most effective way to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities.
The Vision Zero plan includes such measures, but city officials have acknowledged it hasn’t worked quickly enough. In July 2019, council approved a more aggressive version of the program after the initial iteration, adopted in 2016, failed to substantially reduce traffic deaths.
During the pandemic, Toronto has accelerated plans to expand its bike lane network and started regularly closing major streets to car traffic to give people space to safely walk and ride. Those measures were intended in part to provide a “safety valve” for the TTC, because many residents are expected to continue to avoid transit as long as the virus remains a threat.
The city has billed initiatives like the bike lane expansion as potentially temporary, but
Anne Harris, an epidemiologist at Ryerson University who studies pedestrian and cyclist injuries, said they should be made permanent. Without better road-safety measures, serious collisions will creep back up as car traffic returns, she predicted.
Of the 63 deaths or injuries Toronto recorded in the first six months of 2020, 54 of the victims were pedestrians and nine were cyclists. There were seven deaths, all pedestrians.
City spokesperson Hakeem Muhammad acknowledged in an email that it will “take a sustained, long-term effort” for Toronto to eliminate serious traffic injuries.
But he said there are encouraging signs. Before the pandemic hit, deaths and injuries in the first two months of 2020 were slightly lower compared with previous years, although it’s difficult to draw conclusions from such a short period of data.
Muhammad said the city is taking strong steps this year to improve road safety, including reducing speed limits on 250 kilometres of minor arterial and collector roadways. Last month, 50 automated speed enforcement cameras began issuing tickets for the first time and nabbed more than 7,600 lawbreakers in just two weeks.