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EDITORIAL: Road safety for some, sometimes (Summer 2024)

October 15th, 2024 · No Comments

When Ontario Premier Bill Davis stopped the Spadina Expressway, the decision could have been a defining moment for Toronto. But over a half century later, it’s still not clear that we are “building a transportation system to serve people” instead of automobiles. Construction projects and heavy trucks that endanger vulnerable road users, along with politicians devoted to protecting the status quo, continue to block a more people-friendly way forward. The death of a young female cyclist on Bloor Street on July 25 offers additional, tragic evidence that we still live in a car-first reality.  

It’s easy to find construction projects where the safety of people looks like an afterthought, beginning with the year-long road work on Bloor Street between Spadina and Avenue Roads. 

When the Bloor work started in August 2023, the first casualty was the bike lane, obliging people on bikes to travel single file with cars and trucks in narrow lanes where some motorists were quick to assert their power advantage, especially at dangerous merge points. Among the over 5,000 daily Bloor cyclists, about 10 per cent predictably took refuge on sidewalks, potentially undermining the safety of pedestrians. 

Meanwhile, where detour routes are indicated to get around a road construction site—instead of providing safe passage through it—some efforts verge on the absurd. On Queen’s Park Road, just south of Bloor, where an elevator is being installed for the TTC’s Museum station, a detour for southbound cyclists was so long (1.7 kilometres) and so challenging (including two left turns) that very few people could be expected to use it, given that the obstruction itself was a mere 50 metres long. 

Heavy trucks are another well-known peril because of driver blind spots and the risk of a person being pulled under the rear wheels in a collision. Anguished community pleas for remedial action after these deaths are as predictable as they are futile. Since 2018, cement, dump, and flatbed trucks have been involved in four deaths at or near the Bloor and Avenue Road intersection alone. The government and industry response has been consistent, but only in trying to pass the buck or to fight improvements, including truck side guards twice recommended by Ontario coroners in comprehensive death reviews. 

Illegal placement of construction materials in bike lanes is a variation of long-standing problems of illegal, poorly enforced rules against parking in bike lanes by motorists who often wave off their delict with: “l’ll just be a minute.” While we don’t yet know definitively why the young woman exited the bike lane on July 25 before she was struck and killed, we do know that a construction bin was illegally parked in her path.

Fortunately, solutions to the existing dangers are not hard to find.

First, we need clearly articulated, consistent rules for all construction sites, based on the paramount importance of human life in our Vision Zero Road Safety Plan. 

Second, the city must follow a clear hierarchy—with pedestrians and cyclists at the top—in deciding how to use available road space to provide safe passage through construction sites. The parking of personal vehicles by construction workers will fall low on this scale. Maintaining bike lanes and sidewalks, even if it means closing a road to motor traffic, must come first. 

Third, we need effective and routine monitoring of construction projects that intrude on public rights of way—and routine enforcement for noncompliance. In the aftermath of the July 25 tragedy, Mayor Olivia Chow spoke of instituting an urban “mobility squad,” similar to one in Montreal, to monitor streets for dangers. Whatever the name, such patrols can’t come soon enough, especially to deal with cavalier attitudes to obstructing bikeways and sidewalks. Would any company illegally obstruct a bikeway if it reasonably feared being caught and penalized? 

It’s time to build a city for people as if our lives depended on it…because they do.  

Albert Koehl is an environmental lawyer, coordinator of Community Bikeways, and author of Wheeling through Toronto: A History of the Bicycle and Its Riders.

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