Here’s a statistic: Last year, 63 people died in traffic accidents in
Toronto. That’s more than the number of people who died by homicide.
Here are a few more numbers for context: In 2005, when we lived
through the “Summer of the Gun,” 52 people were killed in gun murders.
During the SARS crisis of 2002–2003, a total of 44 Canadians died from
the respiratory infection. In the old days, before we erected a suicide
barrier, about nine people per year fell or jumped to their deaths from
the Bloor Viaduct. You may remember the public concern—sometimes
bordering on panic—about those events, as well as the various responses:
the massive overhaul in policing methods and social-service delivery
that followed the gun deaths; the entire city outfitted in masks and
hand-sanitizing stations during and after SARS; the erection of the
$5.5-million “luminous veil” on the bridge over the Don.
In a recent post on Torontoist,
David Hains charts how, in 2013, we saw the deaths of 40 pedestrians,
12 motor-vehicle passengers or drivers, seven motorcyclists, and four
cyclists on Toronto’s roads. Where is the panic? Where is the outrage?
Where is the public resolve that this is a situation we must address?
But other than Hains’s piece and an op-ed by Benjamin Gillies in the Toronto Star, I haven’t heard a peep about the death toll.
Perhaps we panic more about deaths from things that seem insensible,
or useless—criminals and diseases (mental and physical) that appear to
kill for no reason that we can fathom. But when it comes to traffic, we
appreciate the social purpose. People need to get around, to work and
play and live their lives. Cars and trucks and buses make that task
easier. In many cases, they make it possible, period. So, perhaps we
think traffic fatalities are the price we pay for the social good of
transportation. They’re sad, but inevitable.
Mayor Rob Ford has certainly hinted at that opinion. He once claimed that cyclists who were struck by vehicles were basically asking for it,
because they are “swimming with the sharks” by traveling on roads he
thinks are meant for cars and trucks. When Toronto’s chief medical
officer of health, David McKeown, suggested in 2012 that speed limits across the city should be lowered to 30 kilometres per hour
on residential streets and 40 kilometres per hour on standard arterial
roads because his research indicated this would save lives, Ford and his
brother deemed the good doc’s $294,000 salary “an embarrassment” and
suggested he should be fired.
But while some accidents may be unavoidable, we don’t need to accept
such a high number of fatalities. There are things we can do as a
city—starting with reviving McKeown’s suggestion—to save lives on our
streets. That’s especially true in the case of the 40 pedestrian deaths,
where we can see that many were entirely preventable through better
road design. Most pedestrian deaths happened in intersections, and in
the suburbs, many victims were hit by cars making left turns across wide
roads. Advocates suggest longer crossing times for pedestrian signals,
more widespread “zebra” stripes painted on crosswalks, and changing the
curb structure to make drivers turn slower and “more deliberately,” as
Hains puts it. It’s a lot of little things that add up to more awareness
among drivers that they are sharing the road with vulnerable fellow
travellers.
As the percentage of people relying on public transit and walking
continues to go up dramatically in inner suburban areas designed for
cars, we need to think carefully about how to make those streets safer
for those who use them.
Can we do it? Absolutely, we can. The question is whether we will.
This is a city that will remodel entire bridges, implement widespread
health practices, and spend millions of extra dollars on policing
individual neighbourhoods to save dozens of lives if and when the public
is concerned and afraid and angry enough to demand it. More people died
in traffic than in homicides last year. Are we ready to do something
about it?
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