Mayor Tory’s road safety plan may change - but not the funding

Changes to Mayor John Tory's road safety plan are unlikely to placate pedestrian and cycling advocates.

Thestar.com
June 15, 2016
By Ben Spurr

A road safety strategy criticized as too timid may be tweaked before it goes to city council, but Mayor John Tory says it will not get additional funding.

Tory and public works chair Councillor Jaye Robinson, who unveiled the strategy Monday, immediately faced backlash over the document’s stated goal of reducing traffic-related injuries and deaths by 20 per cent over 10 years.

They have since pledged to amend it to explicitly target zero fatalities, but at a news conference Wednesday to announce an early end to repairs on the Gardiner Expressway, Tory said the money allocated to the road safety plan will “remain the same.”

Any change not accompanied by more funding is unlikely to placate pedestrian and cycling advocates, who are heaping pressure on the city to take stronger action to prevent the deaths of vulnerable road users.

Relatives of traffic victims gathered Wednesday morning in Nathan Phillips Square to demand “Vision Zero” policies aimed at eliminating injuries through safer street design.

Among the protesters was David Stark, whose wife, Erica, 42, was killed in 2014 when a minivan mounted the curb at Midland Ave. and Gild Dr. and struck her. The collision left the couple’s three young boys without a mother.

“I feel that I have to try to come to terms with what happened to her, and do what I can to prevent a similar fate happening to other people and their families,” said Stark.

“We need to make bolder moves, and it has to happen quicker than the politicians are planning.”

There were 65 traffic deaths in 2015, a 10-year high, and already this year 17 pedestrians have been killed. They include a 38-year-old woman who was run over by an SUV on Tuesday while she worked at a downtown open-air market.

The city plan proposes spending $68 million over five years on road safety initiatives such as pedestrian-priority crossing signals, enhanced crosswalk markings and radar technology to catch speeding drivers. About $40 million of that is new money.

Tory told reporters Wednesday that if the $150-million bike network council approved last week is taken into account, his administration is investing “hundreds of millions of dollars” in safer streets.

He conceded that the 20-per-cent target - which he defended on Monday as “realistic” and “honest” - was a “communications error,” but reiterated that his goal was always to eliminate fatal collisions. The original document said zero fatalities should be the city’s long-term “vision,” but set no target date.

“I think what we realized is that what people want and what our intention always was, is that the number of people killed and injured we should try to get down to zero, through every means we possibly can, and we should try to do that as quickly as we possibly can,” Tory said.

The plan will be debated at Monday’s public works meeting, where Robinson (Ward 25, Don Valley West) intends to introduce a motion setting the zero fatality target. The councillor also told the Star she’s asked advocacy groups Cycle Toronto and Walk Toronto to provide input on how the committee could “tweak and modify the report to make it more effective.”

While Tory has ruled out extra funding, Robinson said she is considering adding an amendment to review the road safety budget in two years, when she suggested more money might be available.

But Jared Kolb, executive director of Cycle Toronto, said that without increased investment now, the plan will remain inadequate.

“It’s the same plan. I don’t think it goes far enough,” he said. He charged that the proposed measures - which include making street corners safer at a rate of two intersections a year and reducing speed limits only on select streets - don’t match the urgency of the problem.

“That says that we’re OK with 50, 60, 70 people dying on our roads this year, and next year, and the year after that. We need significant resources applied to this, and we need a bold goal to eliminate fatalities within 10 years,” he said.