No, lower speed limits don’t kill people. That’s crazy
Poll shows vast majority of Torontonians support lowering street speeds but city hall seems hell bent on giving cars the right to fast and unencumbered movement.

thestar.com
By EDWARD KEENAN
June 27, 2017

Given the political culture of Toronto City Hall, where the right to fast and unencumbered movement of automobiles is considered a self-evident truth, it was interesting to see poll results this week showing Toronto citizens may feel a bit differently.

Specifically, it seems more than 80 per cent of us support lower speed limits and longer travel times on the roads if it means safer streets. Moreover, 80 per cent support a “safe network of bike lanes across the city” and 69 per cent support keeping the Bloor St. bike lanes, in particular.

These are surprisingly large numbers in favour of changing the congested car culture of the city. A surprise, but a pleasant one: that saving lives should trump speed of movement strikes many of us as obvious. But so far, not all of our elected representatives are ready to embrace obvious conclusions.

Take Councillor Stephen Holyday, of Etobicoke Centre. He’s hostile to the obvious, working on the logic that there’s a danger hidden in it.

He told my Star colleague Kate Allen that we ought to be careful about something like lowering speed limits, or adding bike lanes. Those things are meant to save lives, see. But what if - stick with him here - what if they would actually endanger lives!

“If drivers and cyclists and pedestrians are collectively frustrated by increased controls and configuration changes, that raises the stress level and raises aggression,” he said. And that, see, that makes the street less safe.

There’s a certain appeal to this kind of counter-intuitive argument - painting a picture of the kind of irony that makes for fun drama. The very things they we’re doing to save lives were killing people. And if you cock your head and squint your eyes, it’s possible to see a kind of barstool logic to it, too. I get frustrated driving slowly in heavy traffic, so maybe that frustration would lead to aggression, which would lead to some kind of bloodbath on the streets.

And it is an argument that seems to have some supporters on city council, since I’ve heard it periodically there in the past few years from Holyday and others.

What this argument doesn’t have is a shred of evidence I can find that would lead anyone to suspect it might be true.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Gil Penalosa, when I put Holyday’s lack-of-speed-kills argument to him. Penalosa is the founder of 8-80 Cities, a global organization devoted to creating “safe and happy cities that prioritize everyone’s well being” by creating vibrant streets and parks.

“It has not been the case anywhere,” he says of streets becoming more dangerous when speed limits are reduced. “Everywhere they have reduced speeds, they reduce accidents. They reduce deaths.”

Leah Shahum, the founder and director of the Vision Zero Network in the U.S. which coordinates research and programs in cities across the country to try to eliminate road accident deaths, says pretty much the same thing. “In 20 years of working on traffic safety issues, I’ve not seen evidence to back up the claim...about detrimental impacts on safety,” Shahum writes in an email.

She points instead to a slew of studies that show the opposite: that where protected bikeways are installed, there are up to 90 per cent fewer injuries. In New York City, she points out, when protected bike lanes have been installed, injury crashes for all road users (car drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists) typically drop by 40 per cent and by more than 50 per cent in some locations.

Shahum also points to a large body of research showing that lowering speed limits saves lives, and increasing them leads to more deaths.

There is, in fact, no need for us to scratch our chins and theorize about how these things might or might not work, since there are cities all over the world that have lowered speed limits and installed bike lanes and pedestrianized streets and done all kinds of other things to slow down traffic and encourage cycling and walking. And what those cities show is that accident rates go down.

Hmmm. But what about driver aggression?

Just to be sure, I called Dr. Christine Wickens, a scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and at the University of Toronto who is on the board of directors of the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals. I called her specifically because she has studied driver aggression and its causes.

She says that if a study has been conducted specifically contrasting road safety measures such as bike lanes and speed limits with levels of driver aggression, she is unaware of it. She says it’s possible that if such measures slow down people’s commutes, there may be more frustration and inconvenience for drivers. “But it should be looked at as part of a system,” she says, “that prioritizes road safety over convenience - prioritizing lives is more important than a commute being reduced by five minutes.”

I put forth Holyday’s thesis about road safety measures creating an unsafe menace of raging drivers on the streets. “I have seen no research to indicate that would be the case,” Wickens says.

I have my own theory. And that’s that frustrated drivers moving more slowly than they would prefer to don’t necessarily drive more recklessly - or at least not enough so to counteract the safety benefits of slower-moving vehicles and of protections on the roads for bikes and pedestrians. Instead, I think they channel their rage into politics, phoning and emailing and yelling at their city councillors.

That might explain the curious reluctance of politicians to accept the obvious facts that this week’s poll shows are supported by such an overwhelming number of regular Torontonians.

It’s not the safety of the roads they are worried about, it’s the safety of their votes. That’s where we have work to do: the 80 per cent of us who support safer roads need to make enough noise that they understand that saving lives on the street will actually make their political careers safer.