Why are Toronto streets still so deadly?

Jordan It was boxing day in downtown Toronto, even during a pandemic wave, that is a sure recipe for pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. And really something like this was bound to happen. I mean, statistically, something like this happens every week or so, in this city. It’s just not usually this bad. And this blatant

News Clip 1 How the teenager critically injured in a boxing day collision in Toronto died of his injuries. On Saturday Kean McKenzie was standing on a street corner with his brother and father when they were all hit by a vehicle that launched onto the sidewalk.

Jordan In a city that took pedestrian and cyclist safety seriously, this would be such an aberration, that it would be a massive story, a rare and tragic event that never had to happen. But this is Toronto. So the tragedy was one of dozens from last year.

News Clip 2 An 18-year-old cyclist was struck and killed here, near Avenue Road and Bloor last night. A commercial truck behind me was traveling I believe to be south on Victoria Street and fatally killed an adult woman.

News Clip 3 A shoe and a cell phone left on the road here on Yonge Street just north of Lawrence where a young man and woman were struck by a vehicle overnight.

News Clip 4 To the streets now where two people are dead after being struck by vehicles in two separate incidents tonight in the GTA.

Jordan Toronto calls itself a Vision Zero city, which is a framework that cities around the world have adopted to eliminate injury and death on their streets. We have been working on Vision Zero for years and Toronto. It’s just not working. Why is that? What have other cities done that Toronto hasn’t? How does the way this city was built make its streets so dangerous? And is this a massive challenge almost impossible to solve? Or is it a planning issue that we’ve just never planned for? Or paid for?

Jordan I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is the big story. Ben Spurr is the transportation reporter at the Toronto Star. Hi, Ben. Hi there. Can you start by describing what happened in downtown Toronto on Boxing Day?

Ben Spurr Yeah, so I’m on Boxing Day, at around 2 pm. In the afternoon, according to police, a driver who was in the middle lane of Richmond streets, it turned into a driver who was in the left-hand lane, causing that second car to roll over and strike seven pedestrians who were standing on the sidewalk. One of those pedestrians 18-year-old man named Kean Mackenzie was killed in the crash. And just really a horrible collision, a deadly crash of course, but also just so many pedestrians being injured in one crash. Like this was just I think a really alarming incident.

Jordan Tell me about the reaction to it as well. What did the police say when they discussed it? And why were people so angry?

Ben Spurr Yeah, so a police spokesperson was talking to media after the collision. And he said that pedestrians need to, quote, keep their eyes open. And this really infuriated a lot of advocates, road safety advocates. And others really because it seemed I think to many people that the underlying message seems to be that, you know, these things happen. It’s up to potential victims to kind of look out for themselves and kind of placed the responsibility for you know, their injuries on these people who were hit and one of whom ended up dying. And I think that’s the kind of messaging around traffic collisions that I think a lot of people are increasingly finding unacceptable, because I think there’s this shift going on right now in terms of road safety taken on this recognition that, you know, we as a society need to be doing more to prevent these tragedies, we can’t just put the responsibility on people who could end up getting hurt.

Jordan Is that kind of messaging. I know, obviously, that way of phrasing it was insensitive, but is is that sort of messaging the like it’s on the pedestrian to protect themselves. Is that unique to this police spokesperson in this case? Or is that sort of something we’ve seen a lot of in the city?

Ben Spurr Yeah, I think that’s something we’ve seen a lot of in the city. The police I think come under particular scrutiny because of course they talk about these instance all the time so there have been incidences in the past where police abuse kind of similar language about this but it’s not just I think the police. I think you’ll often see media reports that kind of have strange wording around traffic collisions and traffic deaths, that like ascribe a lot of agency to inanimate vehicles for instance. So you’ll see police reports that are then you know, repeated in the media that a car hit somebody and then the car fled the scene, for instance, but of course, as we know, you know, it’s not the car doing that right. It’s the driver behind the wheel of the car. And you know, that may seem like kind of a small or maybe petty thing to point out but I think it is part of this wider shift that I think road safety advocates are urging us to kind of take on to recognize that, you know, these aren’t just kind of things that happen on our streets, these aren’t kind of inanimate vehicles going around, or hurting people. And this is just something that we all have to live with. There are ways to prevent these kinds of things from happening, and that we should be doing more as a kind of society to tackle the issue.

Jordan You probably don’t know this, one of the very first episodes of this podcast we ever did was about a cyclist and pedestrian getting hit and killed on a Toronto street. And that would have been I’m thinking back now, June of 2018. It was it was a huge problem, then. Can you offer some context in terms of like how bad a year was 2021 for pedestrians compared to previous years? What’s the trajectory been?

Ben Spurr So of course, the last two years have been affected by the pandemic for at least periods during the past few years have been far fewer drivers out there on the road, and far fewer I think road use of all kinds pedestrians, as well, right? So last year was better than previous years in the sense that’s only you know, if you can use that word, only 30 Pedestrians died in Toronto last year, and 64 road users total died. So that would include drivers and passengers and motorcyclists, and that kind of thing as well. And the previous year was even lower 23 Pedestrians died in 2020. And that was compared to pre-pandemic years of 42 Pedestrians dying in 2019 and 2018 as well, I think it’s still, you know, quite clear that if 30 People 30 pedestrians are dying on the roads in a year when there are far fewer drivers out there, I think it just goes to show how much work needs to be done to, you know, really reduce these numbers and and stop these deaths.

Jordan Well, let’s talk first about what the city itself has been doing. Over the past several years, they’ve been working on something called Vision Zero, can you kind of give some context and explain what that’s trying to achieve? And how it’s going? I guess?

Ben Spurr Yeah, so Vision Zero, is really kind of philosophy as much as anything else, as well as some, you know, practical measures that are put in place. But the idea of Vision Zero, it was a program that was adopted in the 1990s in Sweden. And the goal as the term suggests, is zero deaths, is zero serious traffic injuries. And so you know, this is part of that shift that I was talking about earlier, that just the idea is not to treat these traffic deaths as inevitable, or as you know, trade-offs that we should accept as part of living in a in a modern city. These are preventable, and the onus shouldn’t just be on road users to prevent them. But it should also be on society as a whole. And that means people who design the roads, politicians who are in charge of policies that affect road use, from that philosophy has kind of derived a whole suite of tools that they’re used to, to tackle this problem. So those could be things like actual physical changes to the roads, a lot of roads were built decades ago. And they’re designed to get cars from A to B as fast as possible and don’t really account for other more vulnerable road users is that a big part of Vision Zero is redesigning those roads to account for the safety of people who aren’t in cars. But then, of course, there’s also things like education programs, and enforcement is a big one as well.

Jordan In terms of those physical changes, what actual practical things are we talking about here? Is this like speed bumps, corners? What are we looking at?

Ben Spurr Yeah, I think those are some that would contribute, you know. I think speed bumps and things like that are often on kind of lower-speed roads. And we know that, you know, the most serious collisions, of course, happen on wide arterial roads where cars are going much faster. So there’s a whole bunch of things that can be done to reduce speeds. And that can be things like narrowing lanes, for instance, if drivers are traveling in narrower lanes, there’s less of a chance that they’ll feel comfortable kind of speeding up. Into just simple things like even you know, adding sidewalks where there may not be sidewalks intersection, reconfigurations can be really important as well. You know, in Toronto, especially out in the suburbs, outside of the core, you’ll you’ll often see intersections that have cutaways basically for turning so instead of waiting for the light with the rest of the cards, you know, a right hand turning driver can go in this little channel, and things like that experts will tell you encourage conflicts with pedestrians and you know, encourage people to the drivers to not slow down. Right to just keep going as fast as they can and make that slight turn. So eliminating things like that can have a noticeable impact on safety.

Jordan We can talk about enforcement in a minute but just to continue with this stuff because it sounds like you know these are the on-the-ground things that need to be done. How far is the gap between committing in word and spirit I guess, to Vision Zero? And how much has been done in Toronto in terms of actually throwing money at it and putting the foot on the gas pedal? I guess use the exact wrong metaphor.

Ben Spurr That’s right. The real criticism, I think of the city’s road safety efforts in the last few years, it’s just the kind of half measured approach to it. And that was right from the start, you know, I think the city introduced this Vision Zero plan in 2016. And as I’ve said, you know, the the idea of Vision Zero was to eliminate traffic deaths, right. But the original plan was not to completely eliminate deaths, but only to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 20%. Over 10 years. And so right from the get-go, you had a lot of road safety advocates saying, you know, that can’t be the goal. We need to be more ambitious than that.

Jordan Thats vision 80%

Ben Spurr Yeah, exactly. Right. And, you know, the, the city’s argument, I think, was that we need to have realistic and measurable targets. But a lot of safety advocates kind of planned out, you wouldn’t take that approach with other things, you wouldn’t say that, you know, we’re gonna aim to only have a few fewer shootings next year in the city, you want to, this is something that is unacceptable, we need to stop them completely. So off to a rocky start. And then the original plan that the city introduced was only about $68 million in spending over about five years. And it was clear after the first couple of years that the collisions were not declining. And City Council kind of doubled down and introduced a kind of 2.0 version of the Road Safety Plan, which still has, you know, more money $123 million being spent over five years. But you know, that’s a very small percentage of the city’s budget. And you know, I think remains to be seen whether or not it will actually deliver results.

Jordan I think a lot of people who have lived in Toronto for a while, especially people who have covered or paid attention to municipal politics in Toronto for a while, are kind of familiar with a pretty stark kind of suburban urban divide. And I’m wondering what you see there in terms of how, how that divide plays into the efforts to really get serious about this stuff?

Ben Spurr Yeah, I think you know, there’s a there’s obviously a physical home divide in the sense that the physical design of our roads in the suburbs is much different than the downtown core. It’s kind of interesting, when you look at maps of pedestrian fatalities in Toronto, a lot do actually happen in the downtown, because they’re just more people downtown. So it’s more likely that someone could get hit there. And then in the kind of outer suburbs on this closer to the borders of the city, in, you know, Scarborough and Etobicoke. Scarborough in particular, actually, there are lots of, you know, wide busy streets where drivers can get up to some pretty high speeds.We know that speeds are often the determining factor in whether a collision is deadly. And so it’s out in those kind of wide, busy areas that, that you also see a lot of pedestrians being killed. And so there is a challenge there, I guess, in actually addressing that, that kind of build form out in those places where it’s not an easy fix, you know, that making those roads safer, would require, you know, extensive redesigns.

Jordan I saw at City Council over the past week, there was a discussion about adding, you know, another few dozen speed cameras, and that even that, which is something that to me seems like a tiny drop in a really big bucket was pretty contentious. And, you know, is there any broad agreement at City Hall, that this is an issue we need to tackle?

Ben Spurr Yeah, I think to be fair, I think that there is much broader agreement than than we might have expected even a couple of years ago, you know, Mayor John Tory has introduced and kind of championed this road safety plan, these allies on council have voted for it. These votes, who approved the kind of overall road safety plan have not been close at Council, there’s pretty wide agreement, that this is a problem that we need to tackle. And I think that is indicative of a shift, right? I mean, the previous mayor, Rob Ford was elected on a platform that really focused on the grievance of drivers. And the idea that, you know, a couple of years later, we’d be even just deploying, you know, things like automatic speed cameras, I think, might have been much more controversial than they have been in the past. As you pointed out, we don’t have that many of them, but they are out there giving out, you know, 1000s and 1000s of tickets every month.

Ben Spurr And there hasn’t been a lot of controversy around that. I think there is a sense of people being, you know, fed up of the number of deaths on the streets. You know, it’s a very local issue. In every ward, I think across the city. If you just look at the local community council agendas, every month, you’ll see tons of requests for lower speeds for speed bumps for that kind of thing. So it counselors I think, and wards who kind of respond to it.There are differences over specific issues, for sure. And then there are some counselors that are more enthusiastic about this than others, but I think a lot of them are kind of cognizant of concerns that their residents have and have been responding. So I take your point. I think that there are some people who are still kind of hesitant about some of these measures, but the kind of idea, that this is a major problem that city council needs to take on, seems to be kind of well accepted at this point.

Jordan I also want to ask you about enforcement is kind of the last prong of this plan. Whether or not I agree with it, I at least understand when we talk about the millions of dollars required to make our roads safer on the ground. You know, you can debate whether or not that money should be spent, but getting tougher on enforcement in a city that, frankly, has a reputation for not great enforcement of bad driving. Seems like the easiest and cheapest way to do that. Have we been getting serious on this? What would it take? Are the police resources too limited?

Ben Spurr Basically, what happened is about 10 years ago, and in 2013, the police disbanded their their targeted traffic enforcement team, you know, they said that they had resource constraints and that kind of thing. So they, we were operating, you know, this massive city was operating without a dedicated police traffic enforcement team. And you saw the effects of that, you know, the number of annual tickets given out dropped from a peak of about 700,000, a year to only about 200,000. By 2018.

Jordan Wow.

Ben Spurr You can look at graphs and see a correlation between the level of enforcement, and the number of collisions, crashes started to rise, after the union was disbanded. And I think this was something that was kind of done quietly that the public didn’t have a lot of knowledge about and it I think, shocked people when they realized that, you know, people have been driving around out there without really anyone paying close attention to how safely they were driving. And enforcement is actually pretty expensive. Police earn high salaries, the manpower or human power, I should say, to, to kind of get people out there on the streets enforcing this is not cheap. I think a lot of people would say that it’s certainly worth it, however, but the upshot of all this is that the police have now reconstituted a dedicated traffic unit. But you know, that lack of enforcement for so long, has really I think, angered a lot of people who are watching this issue.

Jordan The last thing I want to ask you is just in terms of how we view our city, you know, you’ve spoken to a lot of momentum gathering on this topic, which is, which is great, because obviously, there’s a huge problem. But given the breadth of everything discussed, I feel like this is a conversation that goes beyond how to fix our roads and gets into a broader debate over what we expect out of a city as pedestrians, as drivers, etc. And, and is Toronto, having that conversation? Are we ready for it?

Ben Spurr Yeah, you know, it does feel to me that we are having that conversation, I think, you know, I think a lot of road safety advocates would say that we just have not done enough, you know, there’s no one magic bullet to solving this problem. But it is really clear, like what does work, like, for instance, you know, lowering speeds on the roads is a huge issue. You know, if someone gets hit by a car at 60 kilometers an hour, they have a 95% likelihood of dying, when that’s reduced to 30%, at 40 kilometers an hour. So we know that how to make the road safer. And to the city’s credit, there have been widespread speed reductions across the city. But but that kind of major missing point, I think, is actually the kind of redesign of our roads. And that’s not easy. You know, we have all these roads, especially outside the downtown core that are that are wide, that are fast, that are dangerous.

Ben Spurr How do you kind of quickly change those to make them safer, it’s difficult, it does take a lot of investment, it’s going to take a lot more money than the city has currently allocated to that. So I think critics of the road safety plan today would say that, you know, it is a lot of talk. And without that kind of major piece of actually physically redesigning our roads to make them safer, that we’re going to continue to see these deaths happen in our streets. And that’s a conversation that we’re not really talking about yet, you know, spending hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars a year to reconfigure your roadways. You know that that’s doesn’t seem like anyone has the appetite to do that, even though there’s a lot of evidence that it would actually make our city safer.

Jordan And in the meantime, pedestrians get to keep their eyes on the road. Thanks, Ben.

Ben Spurr Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan Ben spur of the Toronto Star. That was the big story. For more from us head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. It will no doubt shock you to learn that one of our very first episodes was about pedestrian and cyclist death on Toronto streets. We’re almost four years old as a podcast. It’s not exactly a fresh issue, but it’s still deadly. You can find all those episodes on the website. We will also tweet out some of our earlier episodes on this issue at @TheBigStoryFPNon Twitter, and you can email us thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]And share your thoughts. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.