‘It’s called Vision Zero, but we’re not at zero’: Toronto’s goal to eliminate traffic deaths comes up short

Since the city adopted the strategy in 2017 to get to zero traffic deaths, traffic fatalities have remained in the double digits.

Thestar.com
Sept. 7, 2022
Lex Harvey

As the long Labour Day weekend saw a wave of collisions that left two people dead and another four people sent to hospital, critics are questioning the city’s commitment to road safety and its Vision Zero program.

This past weekend’s collisions, which included the death of an e-bike rider and a pedestrian in the downtown core, brought the total this year to 42 traffic fatalities. “The stats in some ways speak for themselves,” said Matti Siemiatycki, professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto.

“It’s called Vision Zero, but we’re not at zero,” Siemiatycki said.

The city introduced a strategy aimed at cutting traffic fatalities called Vision Zero in 2017. Five years on, the plan has failed to significantly reduce traffic deaths. Even during the pandemic, when quieter roads meant fewer collisions, motorists continued to kill dozens of pedestrians and cyclists each year.

Vision Zero is a global campaign to make city streets safer by designing them in a way that reduces the severity of crashes. It recognizes that human mistakes are inevitable, but transportation planning can help ensure they aren’t fatal. Since it began in the Swedish Parliament, it’s been taken up by dozens of cities across North America and Europe and has yielded impressive results in cities such as Oslo, Hoboken and Boston.

Toronto launched its own Vision Zero program in 2017, following a record 10-year high in 2016 when nearly 80 people died in traffic accidents in the city. But the program failed to bring about meaningful change, and annual traffic deaths continued to hover around 60 between 2017 and 2019, which was above the average for the four years before 2016.

In 2019, city council unanimously passed Vision Zero 2.0, a revamped initiative that contained a slew of planned measures like speed-limit reductions, road redesigns to encourage drivers to slow down, midblock crossings, more sidewalks and more speed enforcement.

While the city has made some improvements in recent years, transportation experts like Siemiatycki and road safety advocates say Toronto still isn’t doing enough to tackle traffic-related injuries and deaths. As of Tuesday, 14 motorists, 21 pedestrians and seven motorcyclists have died on Toronto’s streets in 2022, the city said.

Traffic-related deaths dipped to 40 in 2020, when most people were staying home, but fatalities rebounded to 60 in 2021. However, serious traffic-related injuries have been on the decline, dropping from 380 in 2018 to 224 in 2021.

“We certainly are seeing some trends that are going in the right direction, but this is something that we’re in the long game for,” said Jacquelyn Hayward, director of transportation project design and management at the city of Toronto. Hayward said the changes she expects will have the biggest effect on road safety will be “geometric changes” -- changes to road design that “really force people to drive more slowly, turn more carefully.”

Another way Toronto aims to protect pedestrians is by adding head-start signals to hundreds of intersections, Hayward said, which give people time to walk to a more visible spot in the intersection before drivers begin turning.

Road safety advocate Albert Koehl said it’s not surprising that Toronto’s Vision Zero plan hasn’t significantly reduced fatalities, because in his view, the city’s commitment to road safety has been only marginal.

“We’re sort of like someone who dips their toe in the water to see what the temperature is like.”

Koehl said Toronto needs to do two things to boost road safety: one, reduce the speed of cars, and two, make more space for pedestrians and cyclists.

Between 2017 and 2021, Toronto installed 50 new speed-enforcement cameras and reduced speed limits on 1,250 kilometres of roads, according to a city brief.

Coun. Jennifer McKelvie (Ward 25, Scarborough-Rouge Park), who is also chair of the infrastructure and environment committee that oversees Vision Zero, cited council’s progress in implementing school safety zones (more than 370 since 2017) and midblock crossings.

“We’ve accomplished a lot in the four years, but certainly we know there is a need to do more faster and we are looking at ways of doing that,” said McKelvie.

In terms of reallocating road space, Coun. Mike Layton (Ward 11, University-Rosedale) said that where councillors have been “willing to take action, we’ve seen some advancement and some improvements,” such as the addition of protected bike lanes to University Avenue and Bloor Street. But it’s not happening as fast as it could, he said, “because there are other priorities and it’s a big city.”

Toronto’s progress on Vision Zero has emerged as a municipal election issue, with mayoral candidate Gil Penalosa promising significant changes to road design and traffic laws in a platform released Tuesday. Penalosa, a prominent candidate in the uphill battle to unseat Toronto Mayor John Tory, vowed to ban right turns on red lights and further reduce speed limits, among other changes he claims “truly align with Vision Zero principles.”

On Wednesday, Tory and McKelvie are set to provide an update on Vision Zero.

Between 2017 and 2021, Toronto spent more than $200 million on its Vision Zero plan (about 80 per cent of the amount budgeted) and set aside another $64 million for 2022. But that amount is just a “drop in the bucket” compared to the funds Toronto devotes to roads, Koehl said, citing the Gardiner Expressway rebuild, which is set to cost more than $2 billion and claim almost half of the city’s planned transportation capital spend through 2030.

Layton and Koehl both say achieving Vision Zero will require a bigger culture shift, away from prioritizing cars over pedestrians and cyclists in this city. There’s “this notion that the convenience of drivers is paramount,” Layton said, and that “success should be measured by fighting congestion.”

“We should be fighting congestion by making it safer and more convenient for people to use other things ... You don’t fight it through moving cars faster through intersections, because that’s also what results in people getting hurt.”