25 deaths on Toronto roads this year show Vision Zero still has long way to go, advocates say
CBC
Toronto's Vision Zero strategy is moving in the right direction, say advocates and experts, but it has yet to meet its goal of ending traffic fatalities and serious injuries on city roads.
So far this year, 25 people have died on Toronto's roadways, the latest data from the city shows. That number includes 15 pedestrians, six motorists, three motorcyclists and one cyclist.
In all of 2022, 50 people died in road incidents, approximately 30 killed by the middle of the year.
"The term for the project is Vision Zero. And really, the goal is to get to zero fatalities and much lower serious injuries," said Matti Siemiatycki, the director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.
"We're not there yet."
The City of Toronto introduced its Vision Zero strategy in 2016 with the goal of reducing traffic-related deaths and serious injuries to zero after 78 people died in traffic incidents the previous year.
It's a strategy that exists in several municipalities around the world, including in the U.S. and Europe. In Toronto, it has prompted the redesign and rebuilding of intersections, led to red-light camera installations to catch speeding drivers, included advance signals for pedestrians and improved bike lanes.
Enforcing traffic laws and educating road users play an important role too, says the city's Vision Zero acting manager Mateen Mahboubi. But changing roads, however difficult, is the piece of the puzzle that will have the biggest impact, he says.
"It's ultimately the road design that's going to self-enforce the kind of speed limit needed," he said.
The challenge: there's already a built environment that cannot all be torn up at once. Mahboubi says staff have been piggybacking off existing repair work to add more safety features to increase the pace of Vision Zero projects. But some advocates say the city needs to move faster to make changes.
Jess Spieker is one of them.
Spieker says she knows firsthand the costs of unsafe roads. Eight years on, she says she has not fully recovered from a 2015 collision while riding her bike on Bathurst Street. Spieker says she still lives with chronic pain and a brain injury from the crash.
She says drivers cannot be relied on to do the right thing, saying road infrastructure changes have been proven to be most effective. As of July 30, Toronto police issued 45,053 speeding tickets, 33,555 aggressive driving tickets and 6,681 distracted driving tickets in the city.
"There are any number of Vision Zero interventions that could have prevented my near-death experience and the way that my life has been blown up," she said.
