Two Toronto police officers survey the scene Jan. 18 after a woman was struck and killed by a TTC bus at Mount Pleasant Road and Eglington Avenue. Tragedies such as this have touched off a debate about road safety in Toronto and the GTA.DAVE CHAN
All of the bad habits accumulated by drivers and pedestrians over the years seem to have culminated in an alarming spate of pedestrian deaths in the Toronto area - 14 in the first month of the year, or 25 per cent of the total for all of last year. These bad habits, which amount to an overconfidence or imperviousness to risk, of drivers and pedestrians, will not be displaced by "public-awareness campaigns" alone. Visible and sustained enforcement of traffic laws is the best way to change the behaviour that in a second's misjudgment, or distraction, can kill someone.
Toronto is not typically the country's most dangerous city for pedestrians. Vancouver has many more fatalities for its size, because more people walk in its moderate temperatures. Montreal has a culture of aggressive jaywalking, but drivers expect the confrontations, and since a spike in deaths in 2006 a police enforcement-and-education campaign has brought some common sense back to the streets.
But in Toronto people are always in a hurry, as if trying to right the work-life balance by maximizing every second. No driver has ever met a yellow light that did not mean floor it to beat the red; every speed limit is deemed an invitation to drive 10 kilometres an hour faster, even on residential streets chock-a-block with children; many of these streets, at great cost, now include speed bumps. And because it is a city in which people get along with one another, and do not tend to have the usual urban alertness for trouble, pedestrians go blithely about, talking on their cellphones, texting, listening to music on headphones while stepping into busy roadways to peer into the distance for the next bus or streetcar.
Distraction is an enormous road-safety issue across the country; where goes Toronto, the rest of urban Canada will probably follow. Louis Francescutti, an emergency-room physician in Edmonton who studies injuries at the University of Alberta, has seen patients who have fallen into holes or lacerated their heads walking into street signs or poles, or walked into cars. "People are not aware of their surroundings," he says. A pedestrian talking on a cellphone does not look two or three times before crossing, and neither does a driver on a cellphone make two or three safety checks. Small risks are thus multiplied.
The deaths in Toronto have come during a mild, snowless January. Most of the drivers and pedestrians have not been elderly. In several cases, bus and streetcar drivers have been involved. Pedestrians and drivers both appear to have been at fault. There is no excuse anyone can point to. Drivers and pedestrians no longer seem to see, or anticipate, one another.
Pedestrians in Toronto account for a rising percentage of traffic fatalities, and represent a major public-health problem, surpassing the death toll of any single month of Toronto's "summer of the gun" in 2005. Police need to lead the response.