‘Someone is going to get killed’: King City woman concerned about speeding drivers

Walkington Way has become bypass to King Road from the GO Station, resident says

Yorkregion.com
March 10, 2020
Laura Broadley

Michele Konieczny is worried something bad will happen.

“Someone is going to get killed on this street,” she said.

Konieczny has lived on Walkington Way in King City for 24 years and the issue of speeding drivers has reached the point where she thinks someone is going to get hurt.

“Today, I was coming home, a car just like mine, he came whipping around the corner but they’re not going on the right side of the road. I had to slam my brakes and stop. This happens all the time,” Konieczny said.

Nobleton homeowner demands more speed enforcement on King Road to protect family
Walkington Way is less than a kilometre from the King City GO Station and Konieczny believes the traffic increases according to when the train comes in.

“They come whipping around the corner,” she said.

Walkington Way has 16 homes and Konieczny said most of the drivers using the road aren’t residents.

“They’re using this street as a bypass instead of going out to Keele (Street) to go to King Road,” Konieczny said.

Konieczny said the issue of drivers going over the 50 km/h limit has increased since a second parking lot was added to the GO Station about two years ago.

Some of Konieczny’s neighbours have complained to the township, but nothing has been done to curb the speeding traffic.

“One of the neighbours put one of the electronic speed signs up in front of his home because he has children. There’s a lot of children in the neighbourhood,” she said.

There’s no curb at the corner of Walkington Way and Dennis Drive, which Konieczny thinks causes a specific danger.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost been hit by cars and truck coming around there, coming so fast. We have a stop sign, nobody stops at this stop sign either,” she said.

Const. Laura Nicolle with the York Regional Police said residents are able to file complaints through the online reporting section of the service’s website.

Nicolle said if the complaint is about a specific driver and the complainant has a licence plate number, it can be filed under the road watch section of the online reporting tool.

If the complaint is more general about the behaviours of several drivers, it can be filed under the community concern section.

“When you file a road watch report it’s assigned to an officer to do basically some followup on it,” Nicolle said.

When a complaint is filed under the community concerns section it goes into the police system as an area for increased patrol.

“If an officer has several community concern areas in the region that they are working, they’ll be able to pull those up on their system in the car and see these are areas that our citizens are letting us know are a problem so we’ll dedicate more time to that,” Nicolle said.

The time an officer spends in a specific area is tracked as well as what occurred while they were there.

“They may indicate their presence actually slowed things down or they may say, ‘You know, no. Police presence wasn’t enough, I still observed this many infractions, I issued this many tickets,’” Nicolle said.

Nicolle said community members are able to contact police to see when an officer was in their area.