Vision Zero working to keep Toronto streets safer

Torontosun.com
Feb. 27, 2023

Some days it feels as if you’re risking your life if you walk, bike or drive around Toronto.

Since the pandemic, there seems to be a lot more fear, anger and impatience on the roads and the veneer of civil behaviour is badly eroded.

Fortunately, Vision Zero stands between us and total road anarchy.

The Vision Zero Road Safety Plan (RSP) began in 2017 and is a program aimed at eliminating traffic-related deaths and serious injuries on our streets. The goal is to make streets safe for all users.  Vision Zero is connected to other initiatives, such as the cycling network plan and the city’s climate action strategy.

For 2023, city hall has set aside a Vision Zero Road Safety Plan budget of $72.3 million -- more than any other year.

Vision Zero is working. Last year, Toronto saw a 34% reduction in deaths and serious injuries compared to the pre-COVID five-year average (2015-2019).

Vision Zero’s program covers a vast range of items, including community safety zones, red-light cameras, pedestrian head-start signals, school safety zones, traffic calming infrastructure, speed limit reductions and speed cameras.

It’s an ongoing initiative, according to Hakeem Muhammad from Transportation Services, “To protect vulnerable road users and curb speeding and aggressive driving behaviours.”

Muhammad provided an extensive list of changes and improvements, including the 2022 installation of 200 speed bumps and more than 400 School Safety Zones across the city (which include safety signs, pavement markings and stencils, flashing beacons and driver feedback signs.)

Some 1,000 intersections in Toronto now have a Pedestrian Head Start feature; crossing guards guide school children at 800 locations around the city.

There are 74 new red-light cameras (for a total of about 300 in Toronto) and 75 speed cameras continue to issue tickets in Community Safety Zones.

Much as Vision Zero helps ameliorate bad behaviour on the roads, everyone who uses the roads has to do his or her part to ensure personal safety.

Toronto Police Const. Sean Shapiro, a traffic expert, says enforcement focuses on the big three when it comes to drivers: aggressive, distracted and impaired driving, “because these are choices, and they lead to injury and death.”

Shapiro sees a lot of entitlement and anger on the roads and specifies speeding as one of the biggest issues out there. In the case of an accident, he said, doing 10 km/h over the limit can mean doing 10 times the damage.

Meanwhile, Shapiro and his colleagues continue to write hundreds of cell phone tickets every week.

What’s important now, he said, is that everyone who uses the roads must take responsibility for personal safety.

“We can say, ‘motorists have more responsibility because cars can hurt you,’ but everyone has to take ownership, and that’s not victim blaming.”

Cyclists and pedestrians have to be scrupulous in following the rules of the road, and they have to be alert to what’s around them at all times -- for their own safety.

Having the right-of-way won’t protect you if, for example, someone runs a red light.

“As my mother used to say,” added Shapiro, “you can be right and dead at the same time.”