We have been writing for some time on TreeHugger that Vision Zero in Toronto is a joke, but that is no longer the case; we have now learned that in fact, it is a tragedy.
Pedestrian and cycling activists have been complaining for years, as we watched the number of deaths and injuries continue to rise. Many of the victims were older, and the crashes disproportionately occurred in Scarborough, and formerly borough to the east, which is full of wide, fast-moving arterial roads. Everyone was screaming for action, and City politicians brought in a Vision Zero plan.
In New York City, and most North American Vision Zero initiatives, enforcement gets high billing as part of the plan. So it was with some dismay that Torontonians learned that the Toronto Police pretty much-stopped enforcement in 2013, during the Rob Ford "war on the car" years. They had other uses for the money. David Rider of the Star writes:
Those advocates expressed shock and outrage when a report from Chief Mark Saunders revealed Toronto "does not currently have a complement of officers that are solely dedicated to enforcing duties daily," with traffic services focused on crash investigations. "How many of the innocent, loved human beings killed since 2012 would still be alive today?" Jessica Spieker, a member of Friends and Families for Safe Streets who suffered a broken spine and brain injury when a driver hit her in 2015, asked board members, holding up photos and reading names of Torontonians killed on the streets.
Nobody has calculated how many people died because the Police were not enforcing the law. Rider writes:
Keagan Gartz of advocacy group Cycle Toronto said police failed Torontonians by not treating road safety as a priority with people suffering, many of them senior citizens, dying while crossing the mid-block, dying every year and many more suffering serious injuries.
Shawn Micallef nailed it in his article, Toronto police gaslighted us on traffic enforcement. Their neglect path lives at risk:
As little as two months ago, Saunders was on CBC Metro Morning downplaying the effects of less police enforcement. On Twitter, as deaths and grievous life-changing injuries continued to add up for months, individual police officers would routinely lecture pedestrians and cyclists about their behavior when asked about lack of enforcement, as if drivers were not the ones operating a machine with the deadly force. City-data also shows pedestrians usually found at fault when they get hit. Gaslighting, and probably as enraging as it is scandalous because lives could have been saved.
It gets worse. They are putting the police back on the beat, but only after shaking the city down for more money to pay the Sergeants and Constables overtime, and they are grabbing the money from the Vision Zero fund. So the money that was earmarked for making streets safer, for road design and education, is going to pay the police to do what is surely their job. The police justify their actions in the report, according to Chris Selley of the Post:
..the official media line is borderline bewildering: "Toronto is a growing city with increasing police demand and high priority calls for a service that involves an immediate risk to life or the public," a spokesperson told the Toronto Star. Pardon? How many people have been thumped, mangled and squashed to death by this city's spectacularly incompetent, sociopathic drivers before being considered "an immediate risk to life or the public"?
It gets even worse. Chief Saunders then lists among the problems in Toronto, bike lanes and AirPods, demonstrating that (a) he has no understanding of what Vision Zero is, and (b) no knowledge of the data that shows that headphones are rarely a factor, or (c) there are lots of people, especially older ones, who have trouble hearing anytime, but that doesn't mean they deserve to die in the roads.
It then just gets absurd. Scarborough City Councilor Cynthia Lai, who just a few months ago rejected Vision Zero initiatives in her ward, suggesting that "major problems are left turns, and mid-block crossings by people chasing the bus," invited police to meet older people in her ward to give them fluorescent yellow armbands. She says "it was about being 'proactive'." According to Mary Warren in the Star,
Footage of bands being strapped on seniors drew harsh words from road safety advocates on social media. Advocate Jessica Spieker called it a "textbook victim-blaming" that contributes to "misinformation" that pedestrians seem to contribute to their own deaths when the "vast majority" of time drivers and infrastructure are at fault. "To distribute armbands to seniors flagrantly flies in the face of all road safety records," added Spieker, a spokesperson for advocacy groups Friends and Families for Safe Streets.
Then James Pasternak, the City Counselor who is the chair of the Infrastructure and Environment Committee, who should have some vague idea of how Vision Zero works, tweeted his two cents in support of Councillor Lai.
So now it appears that citizens have to dress up like construction workers when they go outside - even though we know that even on construction sites these vests are safety theater, and that, of the "fatal four" causes of death on construction sites, only 5.1 percent was due to the kind of "caught-in-between" events that could help.
Or that even the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) suggests that in the Hierarchy of Controls, it is the last thing one should be worried about, and only after fixing everything else.
So this is where we are in Toronto today. A police chief blaming AirPods, the man in charge of Vision Zero wanting everyone in yellow vests, the Police Department taking Vision Zero money to do what they should have been doing all along, Vision Zero in shambles, and who knows how many people are dead. Welcome to Toronto. Bring your yellow safety vests and keep out of their bike lane.
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