Inside the slow process of speeding up measures to slow down drivers on Toronto’s streets
Residents and councillors want the city to streamline the complicated process for installing traffic measures such as speed bumps and pedestrian crossings.

TheStar.com
April 6, 2018
Ben Spurr

Larry Kidd thought he was doing the right thing when he rallied his neighbours to ask the city to make their street safer.

Kidd, 64, lives on Hanson St., a residential road in the Upper Beaches. When he moved there two decades ago it was quiet, but, as many Toronto residents have, he’s become anxious about what seems like a growing number of drivers speeding up and down in front of his house.

Concerned for the safety of the young children in the neighbourhood, as well as for his own grandchildren, last fall he decided to do something about it.

He spent hours going door to door asking neighbours to sign a petition to have speed humps installed on Hanson. Although there was broad support for the idea, last month he heard back from the city; the proposal was being rejected.

While transportation services had conducted a study that found hundreds of drivers a day were travelling faster than 43 km/h on Hanson, which has a posted limit of 30 km/h, the street didn’t meet the criteria for speed humps, according to city policy.

Kidd said he’s frustrated. He thinks the city would rather wait for a collision to happen than take acting to prevent one.

“All it takes is just a bad move by one of these drivers,” he said.

“The attitude seems to be: ‘Let’s wait until some poor kid gets hit, and then maybe we’ll think about putting speed bumps in.’ ”

For years, residents, safety advocates, even councillors, have complained the city’s process to implement even minor traffic calming projects such as speed humps, chicanes, or mid-block pinch points is unnecessarily complex.

The system is under renewed scrutiny amid growing concerns about pedestrian deaths in Toronto, which in 2016 hit their highest level in more than a decade, and questions about the efficacy of council’s $86-million Vision Zero road safety plan.

Dylan Reid, a co-founder of pedestrian safety group Walk Toronto, argues the system is too restrictive.

“It’s definitely conceived at the moment as a way of discouraging measures unless they’re so obviously required that (city officials) can’t say ‘no,’ ” he said. “As opposed to taking an approach that says, ‘we’re trying to make the city safer in every possible way.’ ”

According to the transportation department, the city receives about 500 requests for traffic-calming measures each year, and implements about 30 to 45 of them depending on budget “availability.”

Simpler traffic calming measures, such as speed bumps cost between $3,000 and $5,000, while larger projects, such as raised intersections can cost as much as $100,000. The city’s annual budget for traffic calming on local streets is $400,000.

Projects on busier roads such as traffic lights, stop signs and pedestrian crossings are considered measures for traffic control, not traffic calming. The capital budget for transportation services includes about $2.2 million a year for new traffic-control measures.

For a traffic-calming project on a local street to be approved, it must meet a series of specific criteria called “warrants.”

First, residents must voice their support by signing a petition, attending a public meeting, or by completing a survey conducted by their local councillor.

Then the proposal must pass a safety assessment that takes into account factors such as the presence of sidewalks and the slope of the road. That’s followed by a technical assessment to determine whether enough drivers are using the street, and if enough of them are driving too fast, if action is warranted.

A report is then submitted to community council, but even if councillors on the committee approve the proposal, local residents must again give their assent through a poll conducted by the city clerk.

The poll is only considered successful if at least 60 per cent of returned ballots are in favour of the installation, and if more than 50 per cent of affected households vote.

The latter requirement can mean that, even if few people in the neighbourhood object to a proposal, the warrant isn’t met. According to city data, between 2008 and 2013 there were 119 polls conducted for speed humps. In 91 of them, the majority of residents who voted were in favour. But 40 of the positive polls, or nearly half, were tossed out because not enough residents cast a ballot.

Reid argues the participation threshold should be lowered “so that if you do have a core of people who are supportive, and nobody who’s really opposed,” the measure can go ahead.

Traffic control measures on busier streets are also subject to strict warrant criteria, but don’t require community polls.

Council Frances Nunziata (Ward 11 York South — Weston) is among those at city hall who want the warrant process to be more flexible. As do other council members, she has so little faith in the process that she often asks her colleagues to overrule staff advice and approve traffic measures in her ward that don’t meet the warrants, and this is allowed under the city’s system.

“If it makes the community and the people that live on these streets feel safer, to me that’s priority,” she said.

She points to a tragic case that occurred in her ward last December, when an 85-year-old woman was struck and killed by a driver while crossing Eglinton Ave. just west of Weston Rd.

On that section of road, a TTC bus stop sits across the street from highrise apartment buildings, and Nunziata said that before the collision she had repeatedly asked for a crossing, but was told it wouldn’t meet the warrants.

“We need to change the whole process,” she said. Nunziata argues city staff should be empowered to take into account the wider context of the street, and not merely the technical criteria.

Mayor John Tory said he would support measures to streamline the process.

“What we need to have is the flexibility now to move in the interest of public and pedestrian and cyclist safety, and do it in a period of time that is faster and do it in a way that is less cumbersome,” he said.

Barbara Gray, the city’s general manager of transportation, said there are reasons why the warrant process is so rigorous: the polling is necessary to determine whether locals support changes to their neighbourhood, while in depth analysis is needed to ensure the measure being proposed is suitable for the area.

Installing traffic measures on one street can have unintended effects on the rest of the road network, Gray said, and, if applied in the wrong context, they can even be dangerous, such as when an unsignalized pedestrian crossing is installed on a busy road, for example.

“There is a really specific need to do a level of analysis to be able to select what’s the right solution for the problem that we’re trying to solve,” Gray said.

She rejected the idea that the warrant process is designed to discourage action. “I would say that my observation in going around various parts of the city is we’ve applied traffic calming in many, many locations,” she stated.

That’s not to say city officials are against change. In 2016 council asked staff to review the warrant system, and after a yearlong delay a report on the issue is expected to go before the public works committee in May.

The report will focus on the approval process for traffic control measures on busy streets, but according to Naz Capano, transportation services manager of operational planning and policy, there are no immediate plans to change the process for measures on local roads.

“We’re looking to add some additional subjective criteria that staff can use” for traffic control on busy streets, Capano said.

As an example, he said greater flexibility could be needed to account for things such as mid-block transit stops.

“What is available to pedestrians to get to those stops? … Those are the type of things that we’re considering beyond just the technical warrants,” he said.