Being a Scarborough pedestrian is, frankly, terrifying

Two Toronto pedestrians were killed this week on the same day, only a few kilometres from each other: one of them, a 17-year-old girl crossing the street in the morning, the other an elderly man crossing the street at night.

The former, Nadia Mozumder, a community volunteer and caregiver to her mother, was a student at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, a car-dominated area of the city where a disproportionate number of pedestrian deaths occur. It’s also an area in which I happen to live.

Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute is a 20-minute walk from my house. Unless she has other plans, it’s the high school my one-year-old daughter will attend one day — the high school she’ll likely walk to. It’s also just down the street from the nursery and elementary school she’ll attend, places we’ll walk to together.

These aren’t walks I look forward to.

Being a pedestrian on one of Scarborough’s arterial roads is frankly terrifying when drivers are racing into the city and kids on foot are racing to get to school. Add a stroller to the scenario and construction scaffolding that obscures your view of cars turning on and off of side streets, and you start to dread walking as you would an extreme sport you didn’t sign up for.

It’s a sport that will only get more treacherous.

A Toronto District School Board sign posted to a new condo development in our area reads, in part, “due to residential growth, sufficient accommodation may not be available for all students. Students may be accommodated at schools outside this area until space in local schools become available.”

In other words, there will be so many kids living in Scarborough Southwest in the coming years, the school board may not know what to do with them.

But the least the city can do is keep them safe, whether they’re walking to their local school or running to catch a bus to whatever out-of-area school the TDSB has assigned them to.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of this appears slim because no one I know of is prepared to support bold changes to the streetscape that would slow traffic and serve Scarborough residents who walk and cycle: changes like dramatically expanding bike lanes, sidewalks and crosswalks.

Changes like those suggested in a University of Toronto Scarborough report released this month about improving active transportation in Scarborough.

From the report itself: “Although the city is working to enable active transportation, there has consistently been a focus on downtown areas when building new infrastructure.

“This report shows that the city’s record on building cycling facilities in Scarborough has been an abject failure, with almost zero progress in Scarborough since 2016 despite significant achievements elsewhere in the city.”

“My heart sinks every time one of these is reported to me,” Toronto Mayor John Tory told the media in the aftermath of Mozumder’s death Tuesday morning. “All it does is redouble my determination with my colleagues to continue to have even more of the measures that we have introduced.”

Few doubt the mayor’s sincerity. That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re satisfied with his response.

“Everybody’s heart sinks, but not everybody has the ability to fix these problems,” says Mark Richardson, a housing advocate whose son attends Birchmount Park Collegiate. Until Tuesday, his son sat in the same chemistry class as Mozumder did.

Richardson has warned his son for years about the dangers of the Birchmount-Danforth intersection where Mozumder was killed.

“They need to put bike lanes all across Danforth to narrow it down and force people to slow down,” he says. “They need to do the same on Birchmount. Nowhere in the city near schools and houses should you have 800 metres of double lane as a straight through.”

Southwest Scarborough is also in desperate need of more speed cameras, a project Coun. Gary Crawford is working on (according to a statement he shared with the Star, he’s “lobbying with provincial government for designation of more speed cameras per ward”).

But it would be helpful if in addition to more speed cameras, roads themselves transformed to serve pedestrians, because contrary to popular opinion there are a lot of us.

Also from the U of T report: “The changing socioeconomic context of Scarborough now hinders car ownership, hence the relatively low level of car ownership, given the area’s urban form, of 0.44 cars per person.”

Scarborough residents aren’t as car dependent as the stereotype and streetscape suggests, and it’s time our environment reflected this fact.

Kids shouldn’t be walking to school on highways. And pedestrian deaths in Toronto shouldn’t be regarded as inevitable — like the result of a natural disaster — when they are entirely man-made.

“I wish we weren’t talking about this,” Richardson said near the end of our call. “I wish she (Mozumder) were in chem class with my kid this afternoon.”

I hate to think that we will probably talk about this again, and again.