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Road Safety & Vision Zero Plan

The perils of photo radar etc:

"David Knight was baffled when he received a fine for driving in a bus lane in Bath – about 120 miles away from his home.

But the builder and his wife, Paula, who live in Dorking, Surrey, laughed when they examined the photographic evidence of their alleged infraction and saw a woman with the word “Knitter” on her T-shirt, which the computer had mixed up with Knight’s registration plate, KN19TER" See: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/motorist-fined-number-plate-t-shirt
 

Motor make-believe​

From link.

Make-believe is a beautiful thing when you’re defending a car-dominated transportation system amidst a disturbing road casualty toll, poor public health, and a climate crisis.

In the past decade, over 4,000 people in Toronto have been killed or seriously injured in road crashes, while sedentary lifestyles from car dependency contribute to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. At the same time, transportation accounts for 38% of Toronto’s GHG emissions, almost all of it from automobiles.

The power, weight and speed of cars make them inherently dangerous, but we’ve long been made to believe that roads can be shared safely, even harmoniously, if only motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians obeyed the law and acted with care and courtesy. Generations of politicians have repeated exhortations to polite behaviour — likely succeeding only in diverting attention from the underlying problem.

Small mistakes in everyday activities don’t usually cause grievous harm, but the power, speed, and weight of cars — despite massive spending over the last century on vehicle safety, road engineering, and education — means that death and injury remain common. Of course, pedestrians and cyclists make mistakes too, but their errors don’t put someone in the morgue.

When cars first arrived on Toronto streets, the danger was quickly apparent, but the casualty toll remained low while cars were few and they were limited in speed, power, and weight. After a car ran over a cyclist on Bay Street in June 1902, the victim got up, dusted himself off, and agreed with the motorist that the poor condition of the road was to blame. At the time, a car, with tires little bigger than a bicycle’s, weighed about the same as a horse. Over the ensuing decades the motor industry added, and promoted, power and speed, while vehicles gained weight. (The first Ford Model T in 1908 had a bit over 20hp, while the latest Ford F-150 weighs almost 5,000 pounds with 400hp.)

By the 1920s, the road carnage provoked public outrage. The driver’s licence, introduced in 1927, was supposed quell the anger, but the casualty toll only worsened. Many people were nonetheless so excited about driving, and others so excited about the profits, that make-believe was preferable to curtailing the number cars. The motor lobby insisted cars were safe, provided drivers were careful and competent and pedestrians obeyed road rules — a theory that worked well until a careful, competent motorist accidentally ran over a law-abiding pedestrian.

Today, Toronto’s (poorly funded) Vision Zero road safety approach implicitly accepts that cars are inherently dangerous and instead of relying on make-believe, treats mistakes as common and predictable. Good road design, including the separation of people on foot or bikes from people driving cars, is a key part of the solution. Carmakers have themselves admitted the underlying problem (albeit after 300,000 road deaths in Canada over the last century) by promising to replace fallible motorists with “infallible” computers in driverless cars. Meanwhile, the industry hypes ever-bigger, more powerful pick-ups as passenger cars.

Make-believe also links cars to nature and sport. (Advertisers now even sneak bicycles into car ads.) In practice, cars promote physical inactivity — a problem that would be worsened by driverless cars — while fouling nature on the drive to nature. The real solution, a goal city policy at least talks about, is to convert the hundreds of thousands of short trips (under five km) travelled daily by car in the city to walking and cycling.

In the make-believe world, the car is a necessity, which allows many planners and politicians to resist changes that adversely affect “traffic” on roads. Thirty percent of Toronto households nonetheless manage to get around without owning a car, even while their transit journeys are routinely blocked by cars. A measurement of traffic volume by all modes along the Bloor corridor in October 2019 showed 267,000 daily trips, among which there were only 17,000 cars. Politicians nonetheless claimed that a proposed bike lane in the same stretch would prevent people from going downtown.

Make-believe even allows for car use to be maintained and perpetuated during this climate crisis, sometimes by pointing to fancy technologies like driverless cars. We’ve already seen one tech solution, ride-hailing services, actually increase motor traffic, while poaching patrons from cleaner mass transit. In reality, our problems are the result of poor choices among available technologies. Toronto’s first electric car was built in the 1890s, at a time when residents already relied on electric streetcars for local travel and electric “radials” to reach the suburbs and beyond.

Even if electric cars eventually dominate the Western market — and assuming the transition (including the replacement of Toronto’s 1.3 million cars and trucks with electric models) can be done within a timeline consistent with the urgency of the crisis — GHG emissions, including from automobile production, might simply rise as gas-powered and second-hand cars flood developing countries.

Yes, make-believe is comforting, but it’s time to put our childish fantasies behind us. Fortunately, seriously reducing private car use by investing in transit, walking, and cycling not only addresses the road casualty toll, poor public health, and the climate crisis but aligns with civic goals of improving affordability, equity, and the liveability of our neighbourhoods.
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ProjectEnd said:
/\ Tuesday. I can't imagine how 'annoyed' you are now, @crs1026...
Click to expand...

These events are tragedies. I never said otherwise. My point being, let’s hear what happened before we villainise any one or anything. Show me that the root causes are attributable to someone’s indifference or inaction, and I will be outraged. But of necessity we are working through a prioritisation of actions on a program that will take years.…. and demands wholesale changes in awareness and general attitudes. How does throwing accusations help that change along?

And if it matters, yes I have experienced this kind of tragedy in my own family, and in my social circle. Which is actually why I want to hear the facts before I react. It’s unhelpful to make assumptions or pull attributions out of the air.

- Paul
 
Wholesale change? Ok: you hit anyone for any reason, you lose your license forever. You're caught on the phone? Lose your license for a year.

I could go on...
 
ProjectEnd said:
Wholesale change? Ok: you hit anyone for any reason, you lose your license forever. You're caught on the phone? Lose your license for a year.

I could go on...
Click to expand...
The former is absurd. Why don’t we stone them too?

The second I wholeheartedly support. Aggressive driving generally is under enforced and consequences are too light. The question is, how many can we catch, and how many have to be prevented by a combination of carrot and stick.

- Paul
 
ProjectEnd said:
Wholesale change? Ok: you hit anyone for any reason, you lose your license forever. You're caught on the phone? Lose your license for a year.

I could go on...
Click to expand...

I don't have a problem with the latter part of your statement; the former is too much. The idea that the driver is 100% responsible and punishable in all situations is over-reach.

I advocate for bike lanes, road diets, mandatory driver training, harsh punishment for those knowingly driving under suspension, or without valid insurance, and absolutely taking a hardline on impaired driving, street racing or distracted driving.
but there is still room not to criminalize driving a car unto itself, particularly if a driver is not at fault for an accident.

Beyond that.......while I think it's fair to say, I would be a bit more assertive on making change that @crs1026 might; demonizing Paul is way too much.

His point of view is well within the bounds of reason, and doesn't merit snark or disdain.
 
^I will share my personal experience as a case study in “it’s complicated, and it should be”

A member of my family was killed while crossing at a pedestrian crossing. This happened on Christmas Eve as the whole family was leaving a midnight service at their church. The fatality happened in full view of the whole family - and the whole congregation for that matter. (So I’m a bit prickly about the suggestion that I haven’t been in the position to “care” sufficiently)

The driver of the car admitted to having been drinking. They failed a breath test and were charged, and later convicted.

Here’s the thing. It was raining heavily. The victim was wearing dark clothing. Witnesses agreed that they had their head down (the rain), rushed into the crosswalk, and didn’t attempt to observe oncoming traffic or make eye contact with the driver. I have to acknowledge that this was true and typical of the victim..

A lawyer who we consulted suggested that the charge - simple DUI - likely resulted from the Crown viewing some or all of those factors as material. Otherwise, a more serious charge eg criminal negligence, might have been expected.

On top of that, the driver had their spouse and kids in the car. They too were coming from a family event and they all saw the whole thing happen. Nobody puts their family through that out of malice. On Christmas Eve. The root cause is more complicated… not adding up risks and consequences of a longstanding lifestyle is different than not caring.

The more anti-motorist side of the UT RS&VZP forum might fixate on the drunk driver’s accountability. Suggesting that pedestrians need to try to be visible at night and cross with care has been ridiculed in these pages as “victim shaming”. but it is the one thing I have most fixated on since then…. it’s just so sensible a precaution

The points I would argue are: a), I do think there are multiple factors to consider in each unique fatality and, b) the three-line report about the accident in the Toronto Star spoke to none of this. So when I see people make comments about traffic fatalities (and decry them dramatically as “violence”) on the basis of a single tweet reporting the fatality, I think they are both misusing the term and clouding rather than clarifying what might have happened.

- Paul
 
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I'm sorry to hear about your loss, Paul. That's terrible and isn't something anyone should go through. Thanks for sharing.

While I agree with you and NL that there is incumbent responsibility on pedestrians to 'be seen', to not look at phones, to maintain an active awareness of their surroundings, etc., at the end of the day, they're incapable of harming anyone. Cars, by contrast, are incredibly deadly things - something that's proven not only in Toronto, but globally, each and every day. While my post above may have been hyperbolic, I still think it's essentially the inverse of our current 'do nothing at all and just hope for the best' attitude (most brazenly practiced by TPS). Whether it's overly-loud exhausts, racing up and down streets at all hours, distracted driving, small accidents, big accidents, etc., the entrenched culture of 'both both sides / shared responsibility' is causing death and mayhem all the time because drivers know they'll get away with it. Extremely strict rules (and actual enforcement from le couchon) won't prevent every death, but it'll certainly make a dent.

At a policy level too, how is it possible that we have speed limits, yet sell cars that can easily triple them (while stringently governing e-scooters / bikes)? Why do we 'shared responsibility' pedestrians and shame anyone on a phone, yet the below is the kind of thing that the entire industry celebrates? It may be from a concept car, but it's absolutely where things are headed if legislation doesn't prevent it. Hell, you can play Nintendo on your Tesla nowadays...

1634679841865.png
 
ProjectEnd said:
While I agree with you and NL that there is incumbent responsibility on pedestrians to 'be seen', to not look at phones, to maintain an active awareness of their surroundings, etc., at the end of the day, they're incapable of harming anyone. Cars, by contrast, are incredibly deadly things - something that's proven not only in Toronto, but globally, each and every day.
Click to expand...

This point is being made more frequently and in more places. So I think the penny is dropping, slowly.

I have to admit that I find my own driving habits are slowly changing as I give this more focus. (Thanks in no small part to discussions like this forum)

As @Northern Light commented, the danger is to morph it into the pedestrian automatically being “right” and the driver being “wrong”. It’s a fundamental bit of awareness that needs to be taught rather than imposed. People won’t absorb the thought if it doesn’t leave room for assigning accountability objectively.

ProjectEnd said:
While my post above may have been hyperbolic, I still think it's essentially the inverse of our current 'do nothing at all and just hope for the best' attitude (most brazenly practiced by TPS).
Click to expand...

The stance of the police and courts baffles me, I will admit. Sticking to old habits and practices that demonstrably don’t work, and erring on the side of not taking unpopular stands.
There has been more speed enforcement lately, but I mostly see “fishing holes” as opposed to constructive enforcement. One example is the speed enforcement on the ramp from eb Gardiner to Park Lawn…it’s a benign location for speed, because the ramp narrows to stoplights…. while just 100 meters away all heck is breaking loose on Park Lawn with unsafe parking and stopping and turning around the coffee shops, and streams of overloaded and undermaintained trucks coming through the food terminal.
I thought the bike radar trap caper was at least courageous… it bothers me that people reacted simply because it was done, not because it was taken to a disproportionate length. I saw that as a bit of cyclist privilege creeping through. I may not be popular for saying that.

ProjectEnd said:
Whether it's overly-loud exhausts, racing up and down streets at all hours, distracted driving, small accidents, big accidents, etc., the entrenched culture of 'both both sides / shared responsibility' is causing death and mayhem all the time because drivers know they'll get away with it. Extremely strict rules (and actual enforcement from le couchon) won't prevent every death, but it'll certainly make a dent.
Click to expand...

We have a culture that doesn’t like to be held to a tight line. We just don’t like anal enforcers of anything. Many cops write down speeding tickets to a lower speed in the spirit of “see, I’m not a bad guy”. If the speed was measured by a properly-functioning device under unambiguous conditions, then the measurement is objective and should be recorded at its true value. And the driver should be held to full account.

ProjectEnd said:
At a policy level too, how is it possible that we have speed limits, yet sell cars that can easily triple them (while stringently governing e-scooters / bikes)?
Click to expand...

If we ever get AV’s It will be interesting to see how the transfer of speed control to the car is accepted. But putting aside for the moment the top speed, the huge problem for our cities is not so much driving at 150 km/h but drivers going 60km/h when they should be doing 40. I have no problem with more widespread use of speed cameras. There is indeed a scarcity of pure political courage on that front.

- Paul
 
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crs1026 said:
We have a culture that doesn’t like to be held to a tight line. We just don’t like anal enforcers of anything. Many cops write down speeding tickets to a lower speed in the spirit of “see, I’m not a bad guy”. If the speed was measured by a properly-functioning device under unambiguous conditions, then the measurement is objective and should be recorded at its true value. And the driver should be held to full account.
Click to expand...
While not getting into a debate about TPS traffic enforcement, when I was a 'road warrior', I always lowered the charge speed from whatever the measuring method revealed. Being reasonable in enforcement practices is never a bad thing but, more importantly, both enforcement measuring devices (which are regularly calibrated) and vehicle speedometers (which are not) have an inherent inaccuracy. They may be small, but they exist.
 
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