Safety campaign points fingers at the wrong suspect

It's not the cars, it's the pedestrians, proclaims a cop - on the day an SUV plows into innocents on the sidewalk.

Thestar.com
June 15, 2016
By Edward Keenan

“The car is not the one committing the offences; it’s the pedestrians.” That’s what police Const. Clint Stibbe told a reporter from Metro on Tuesday morning.

Cops were out at some major intersections directing traffic in the first day of the mayor’s ballyhooed new traffic initiative and, Stibbe complained, many pedestrians on Front St. were insisting on trying to cross the street when the traffic signal countdown was on.

Now, most of us have assumed - because it is the most reasonable assumption to draw from the countdown concept - that a flashing “26” means we have 26 seconds to cross the street, so lots of time. But no. Apparently, the counter-intuitive (and, thus, useless) intention behind the countdowns is that once they start, you can no longer step off the curb to enter the intersection.

Metro says Stibbe clarified, “the countdown is to signal to pedestrians already in the intersection that they have to clear out so drivers can make turns.”

Ha! You may have thought those pedestrian signals were intended to keep pedestrians safe. But it turns out they are designed to stop people from crossing so cars can make turns. That’s a virtue of having police out at these overcrowded pedestrian intersections downtown, you see.

“A lot of people are running so tight on the clock, that now, we start having these types of rules being monitored and enforced, and we’re stopping individuals from crossing, they’re getting frustrated,” Stibbe told Metro.

Rest easy, Toronto. Turning cars will be protected from the menace of straggling pedestrians by Constable Stibbe and his loyal band of crossing guards holding back the tide of walkers on the curb.

This came just 24 hours after Mayor John Tory and Councillor Jaye Robinson cued the fanfare for their big pedestrian safety initiative, which, they boasted, had the visionary goal of cutting pedestrian casualties by ... drumroll ... 20 per cent in 10 years! Because nothing says “we’re absolutely serious about saving lives” like a splashy plan to cut injuries and fatalities by one-fiftieth per year. Ta da!

The reaction, from the press, from cycling and pedestrian activists, from people on Twitter, was something like a long side-eye, and then a sneer, and then stunned disbelief.

So by the end of the day, Councillor Robinson, backed by Mayor Tory, was promising to change the stated goal from being 20 per cent fewer casualties to 100 per cent fewer. It was unclear whether any other changes would be made to the plan to give effect to this goal.

So this was the setup for Const. Stibbe’s comments on the unveiling of the mayor’s other flagship traffic initiative. I’ll remind you that he said, at University and Simcoe, “The car is not the one committing the offences; it’s the pedestrians.”

Something like six hours later, at 2:15 pm, one kilometre away, a black Mercedes SUV “suddenly accelerated, jumped the curb, and plowed into a food vendors tent” on the sidewalk, according to CBC news. Two women were struck and injured. Algie Parucha, a 38-year-old woman, was killed; the other, her sister, was taken to hospital.

It was the 17th pedestrian death in Toronto of 2016.

There seems to be something clarifying about these events taking place within a 24-hour period.

City hall talks about taking safety seriously, and then when criticized, talks even tougher. But then traffic measures, in their implementation, indicate the priority placed by authorities on the convenience of keeping car drivers moving and openly suggests pedestrians are the problem. And then a car driver comes along to illustrate horrifyingly how much higher the stakes are for pedestrians than for those in cars.

It feels like the natural Toronto cycle. Blather, rinse, repeat.

It was bad timing, perhaps, for the mayor to have this happen on the heels of his big announcement. Bad timing, for sure, for Const. Stibbe for his comments about pedestrian misbehaviour to come immediately before such a clear instance of driver misbehaviour. But not as bad as the timing for the woman who wound up dead because she happened to be standing on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon.

Pedestrians may be committing offences, especially if walking during the countdown is an offence. But car drivers are committing offences, too. And it’s those that tend to leave us with a body count. So perhaps those are the ones we want to focus our police and other resources on stopping.