‘Nothing was done until people’s lives were lost’: How a deadly city street has become an election issue in this Toronto neighbourhood

The safety of Parkside Drive has become a flashpoint in the race to defeat incumbent councillor Gord Perks.

Thestar.com
Oct. 14, 2022
Ben Spurr

When Faraz Gholizadeh and his family cross the street in front of their house, he makes sure they stand well back from the roadway while they wait for the light to change.

That’s because Gholizadeh, his wife, and two young kids live on Parkside Drive, a fast, straight, and sometimes deadly road on the east side of High Park, where he says speeding drivers hop the curb and risk slamming into pedestrians with alarming regularity.

“We feel very uneasy crossing the street. We feel very uneasy using the sidewalk,” said Gholizadeh, co-chair of the Safe Parkside advocacy group.

“Why do we have to cross this mini highway in order to go to the park?”

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The hazards of Parkside attracted citywide attention last October when a couple was killed in a five-vehicle collision on the roadway’s southern stretch. But Gholizadeh said he had been complaining about the street to local councillor Gord Perks since soon after his family moved to Parkside nearly a decade ago, and “nothing was done until people’s lives were lost.”

As residents of Parkdale--High Park (Ward 4) prepare to cast their votes in the Oct. 24 municipal election, road safety has emerged as a hot button local issue. Critics of Perks, the area’s four-term incumbent, are hoping to use long-standing concerns about unsafe streets to make the council race a referendum on what they claim is his lack of attention to constituents’ concerns.

“Sixteen years of Gord Perks ... it’s simply not working,” said Gholizadeh.

“It would be nice to have someone who can go in there and has the enthusiasm to bring about change.”

Perks, who was an environmental activist before first being elected to council in 2006, is the de facto leader of council’s progressive wing and one of Mayor John Tory’s most vocal critics, often advocating for increased spending on city services.

Gholizadeh says he’s throwing his support behind one of Perks’s main challengers, Siri Agrell, a former Globe and Mail journalist and deputy communications director for Premier Kathleen Wynne. She was also director of strategic initiatives in Tory’s office from 2015 to 2018, when she worked to advance policies like the Bloor Street bike lanes and King Street streetcar pilot.

Perks “has a reputation for being really dismissive of people” and “not listening to residents,” Agrell said in an interview.

“I’m hearing over and over again that people reached out to the councillor and haven’t got a response.”

Tory has endorsed Agrell in the council race, but she pledges that if she wins she won’t vote in lockstep with the mayor. She says she hopes to play a similar role former councillor Joe Cressy did this past term and would work with Tory, who has governed from the centre-right, to convince him to adopt more progressive policies.

Agrell says traffic safety is a concern in “every single pocket” of Ward 4, and accuses Perks of failing to heed calls to improve conditions on streets like Parkside.

She says she would set a target of no traffic fatalities in the ward, a goal in line with the citywide Vision Zero policy council adopted in 2016. The platform posted to her website says she supports the redesign of Parkside, which Perks has been advancing through the ongoing High Park Movement Strategy, but doesn’t specify what changes she would like implemented on the road.

Perks, who won the 2018 election with 45 per cent support, declined to respond directly to Agrell’s charge that he hasn’t been listening to constituents, saying he prefers to let his record speak for itself.

The councillor doesn’t deny that some residents are frustrated about Parkside, but says “there are also people who are really excited about the progress we’re making” to improve safety on the street.

He says that after years of working with residents, in July 2021 he secured council approval to allow parking during rush hour on Parkside’s east side, which has created a buffer between pedestrians and fast-moving traffic.

After last fall’s double fatality, Perks passed a council motion directing city staff to expedite a number of changes to Parkside that have since been implemented, including lowering the speed limit from 50 to 40 km/h, and installing a “watch your speed” sign.

Other measures Perks supported in his motion, like installing a traffic signal at Parkside and Geoffrey Street and building sidewalks on the west side of the street, are scheduled for completion this year.

The changes made to Parkside so far have hardly eliminated speeding, however. According to city statistics, a radar camera installed on the street this spring resulted in the issuance of more than 13,000 speeding tickets between April and August, making it the busiest of Toronto’s cameras in four of those five months.

But the number of tickets issued per month fell from almost 3,600 in April to about 2,350 in August, which Perks says is a sign of progress.

Chemi Lhamo, who is also running in Ward 4, agrees with Agrell that after four terms Perks has grown out of touch with residents.

“A progressive leader is someone that can pass on the baton to the next generation of leaders,” she said.

But Lhamo, a Tibetan-Canadian human rights advocate and board member of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, argues that Tory-backed Agrell is just as much an establishment candidate as Perks.

Lhamo, who at 26 is among the youngest candidates this election, has long-standing ties in Parkdale. She’s adopted “Bringing Community to Council” as the slogan for her grassroots campaign and says she’s the candidate most attuned to constituents’ needs.

Lhamo says in the long-term she favours a “complete redesign” of Parkside, and supports pursuing “low hanging fruit” to make the street safer in the meantime, like speed bumps, sidewalks, and better signal timing.