‘Shocking’ collision with TTC bus kills one, injures nine

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One person is dead and nine injured after a collision early Sunday morning between a TTC bus and a car.

The bus was travelling east on the 96 Wilson route when it collided with a northbound Nissan Altima at the intersection of Westhumber Boulevard and Kipling Avenue in Etobicoke. One passenger in the car was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver and a second passenger were transferred to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening.

After the collision, the bus continued through the intersection and did not stop before mounting a curb, knocking over a light standard, careening across the parking lot of a shopping plaza and then smashing into a branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Toronto Transit Commission chief executive officer Andy Byford, who rushed to the scene, described it as "quite shocking."

"It's not every day you see one of your buses embedded into the side of a building," Mr. Byford told reporters.

The driver of the bus and all six passengers aboard were taken to hospital after sustaining minor injuries. The bus, its front window smashed, was towed to a TTC facility for inspection.

Toronto Police investigators will review footage from security cameras in the shopping plaza as well as data from the bus's black box, which the TTC has turned over to police. Constable Clint Stibbe of Toronto Police Traffic Services said the probe will also focus on why the bus kept rolling after the collision.

"It's too early to say one way or the other who is at fault," Constable Stibbe said in an interview.

The collision happened at 6 a.m., when no pedestrians were in the area and most of the shops, as well as the bank branch, were closed. The accident could have been much worse had it occurred later in the day, TTC spokesman Brad Ross said in an interview.

"We're grateful that nobody else was injured," he said.

Mr. Ross could not immediately provide statistics on how often buses at Canada's busiest transit agency are involved in fatal accidents, but he said they are "extremely rare."

In August, 2013, a woman was killed in a head-on collision between a TTC bus and a cube van on Steeles Ave. East. And two years earlier, a TTC bus slammed into a flatbed truck on Lawrence Avenue, killing a woman. The bus driver was charged with criminal negligence causing death and marijuana possession. In January, 2011, a pedestrian was killed when he was run over by a bus as it pulled away from a stop on Dufferin Street.

TTC buses and streetcars were involved in 3,015 collisions between April, 2011 and April, 2012, an average of eight a day, according to TTC data published by The National Post. Buses hit 33 cyclists, 55 pedestrians and 1,589 other vehicles.

In the latest accident, police have not yet been able to identify the three male victims in the Nissan. None of them were carrying identification, Constable Stibbe said.