Toronto road-safety push veers off track, naturally

Amid an admirable drive to protect pedestrian lives and open up side streets for play, councillors took a step guaranteed to make them look foolish anyhow, says Edward Keenan.

Thestar.com
July 17, 2016
By Edward Keenan

Toronto councillors demonstrated, in a tiny way toward the end of their epic July meeting, that they are capable of employing common sense. At least a bit.

On Friday afternoon, they legalized road hockey.

Many would be astonished that this national heritage pastime was ever banned, but it was. And city staff had recommended that that status quo be reinforced - that liability concerns and the right of drivers to speed on through neighbourhood side streets meant that only outlaws could have fun. But public outcry and the concerted, prolonged efforts of some city councillors prevailed. Game on.

Sadly this outbreak of logic is not exactly typical. For it was less than 24 hours earlier that the same city council had undermined its own thoughtful, considered, road safety plan - on which it has decided to spend $80.3 million over five years - with a silly bit of symbolic finger-pointing at pedestrians. After hours of discussion and debate and hearing about how road design (the width of traffic lanes, for instance) is the key element to influencing driver behaviour, and therefore making roads safer, Councillor Frances Nunziata introduced an amendment asking the province to outlaw texting while walking.

“If you’re texting and driving and texting and walking across an intersection, it’s, in my opinion, the same,” Nunziata said, introducing her motion to make it illegal to use a mobile device while walking on or across the road. City council voted 26-15 to approve her message.

Let’s look at that logic for a moment. It’s true that texting while driving is illegal, and that texting while walking is not. Maybe that seems odd, until you spend even more than a passing moment examining the parallel. After all, the same is true of all kinds of other things: driving while drunk is illegal, walking while drunk is not; driving while blind is illegal, while walking with severe visual impairment is not; driving at age 4 is prohibited, while walking in childhood is absolutely encouraged. Drivers require licences and insurance, while pedestrians do not. It is illegal, actually, to play hockey or other sports while operating a motor vehicle, but council has just ruled that pedestrians are actually allowed to do these things on the roadway.

Maybe there’s a very good reason a person trying to get across the street at walking speed on their own two feet is subject to less restrictive rules than a person trying to cross it at 60 kilometres per hour surrounded by 2,000 pounds of steel. And maybe that reason is that in the event of a collision, a person walking is generally in danger of serious injury, while a person driving a car is generally a danger to everyone around them.

Maybe it’s the same reason that pointing a loaded gun at someone else is punishable by five years in prison, while pointing one at yourself is not a crime at all.
It was refreshing to see the swift and decisive smackdown laid on this city motion from the provincial government, which said it had no intention of banning phone use among pedestrians, and that if the city wanted such a ridiculous law on the books, they should pass it themselves.

Do not stare at your mobile phone while crossing the street: this is good advice. But it is not required that it be enforced with penalties greater than the risk of death already present in the activity. Moreover, the suggestion of such a law has no appreciable effect on traffic safety in the city.

Which is why, too, the suggestion of the law is not just frustrating in itself, but particularly frustrating in the larger point it makes (and was intended to make), because of when and how it was passed. Because city council was making a big statement with the road safety bylaw in how seriously they take the prospect of saving people’s lives, by being serious about the design and regulation of streets. They spent a lot of time, and energy, and money, to propose measures to redesign roadways and intersections in ways that would encourage safer behaviour from drivers - the things research and logic actually say will make the city safer.

When the initial reaction from some activists was that these things were not enough, city councillors chipped in more money to show how serious they were. Changing driver behaviour: this is the right message to send, if you’re serious.

And then, when it came time to enact the plan, they couldn’t resist throwing in an unserious, almost purely symbolic - unenforceable advice to a different government - motion to show that they also wanted to make sure to publicly blame pedestrians. Were they surprised when that took over headlines from the rest of their road safety work? Were they dismayed that it meant the public debating point about an effort to prevent pedestrian fatalities became about scolding pedestrian misbehaviour?

Serious? Bah.

Status report on city council at the end of the week:

Playing games in the road: finally allowed. Playing games with road-safety politics: still too common.