Road Safety & Vision Zero Plan

[crs1026]

I'm surprised that you're surprised by that.

Not meaning I was surprised really, certainly not new information - more - gosh, it really is those places.

The quandry for me (Your list of factors is quite spot on, I thought) was - how much of this is changeable purely through road redesign and physical change, versus how much of it can only be changed by changing behaviour.

The change factors that I would credit some success this year (having no data to support, purely an observation) are

a) the staggered walk-before-green timing change is an improvement and is training drivers to give way before making turns
b) the renewal of visible police enforcement is creating deterrence
c) attitudes and expectations about speed and travel time are slowly changing... the percent of drivers who accept the need for patience and who give themselves more time to get places has risen a bit.
d) lowering speed limits on many streets

Physical road redesign is great idea but works slowly given budgets etc. Needs to be done, but there have to be drivers accepting different ways to drive on existing roads to get there.

- Paul

 

[TRONto]

Not meaning I was surprised really, certainly not new information - more - gosh, it really is those places.

The quandry for me (Your list of factors is quite spot on, I thought) was - how much of this is changeable purely through road redesign and physical change, versus how much of it can only be changed by changing behaviour.

The change factors that I would credit some success this year (having no data to support, purely an observation) are

a) the staggered walk-before-green timing change is an improvement and is training drivers to give way before making turns
b) the renewal of visible police enforcement is creating deterrence
c) attitudes and expectations about speed and travel time are slowly changing... the percent of drivers who accept the need for patience and who give themselves more time to get places has risen a bit.
d) lowering speed limits on many streets

Physical road redesign is great idea but works slowly given budgets etc. Needs to be done, but there have to be drivers accepting different ways to drive on existing roads to get there.

- Paul

Is B a factor? I haven't noticed much traffic police presence in the past few years. I feel drivers break the law with impunity as they don't expect to get caught. Not sure about C/D either.

A is definitely a factor.

I'd say the addition of bike lanes has added to pedestrian safety. Putting sections of Dundas, Bloor/Danforth and University on road diets is a plus for pedestrians.

 

[crs1026]

Is B a factor? I haven't noticed much traffic police presence in the past few years. I feel drivers break the law with impunity as they don't expect to get caught. Not sure about C/D either.

A is definitely a factor.

I'd say the addition of bike lanes has added to pedestrian safety. Putting sections of Dundas, Bloor/Danforth and University on road diets is a plus for pedestrians.

I have seen more radar traps and traffic stops in the city lately, which compares to the period a while back where the ticketing stats showed (and iirc the chief admitted) that TPS had basically given up on enforcement.

I'm not really a fan of how the police manage traffic enforcement - seems like habitual attention to certain locations where the pickings are easy but not necessarily the greatest actual risk - but I would say the visibility is higher and some of the locations do make sense. It's all about the belief that there may be an officer watching, and willing to intervene....not the actual presence of an officer. More, and more strategic location, might be needed but it's an improved effort so hopefully going in the right direction.

Highway enforcement still lags - great at catching speeders in the open stretches but it's pretty hard to combat the aggressive, weaving, non-signalling tailgaters - the police can't be everywhere. I'm all for much more aggressive use of technology on highways to catch aggressive drivers.

It would be interesting to see data on accidents of all severity on roads that have seen speeds lowered in recent years. One has to think that lower speed means better reaction times and (when collisions happen) less severity of impacts. But this has yet to be proven empirically.

- Paul

 

[W. K. Lis]

Not meaning I was surprised really, certainly not new information - more - gosh, it really is those places.

The quandry for me (Your list of factors is quite spot on, I thought) was - how much of this is changeable purely through road redesign and physical change, versus how much of it can only be changed by changing behaviour.

The change factors that I would credit some success this year (having no data to support, purely an observation) are

a) the staggered walk-before-green timing change is an improvement and is training drivers to give way before making turns
b) the renewal of visible police enforcement is creating deterrence
c) attitudes and expectations about speed and travel time are slowly changing... the percent of drivers who accept the need for patience and who give themselves more time to get places has risen a bit.
d) lowering speed limits on many streets

Physical road redesign is great idea but works slowly given budgets etc. Needs to be done, but there have to be drivers accepting different ways to drive on existing roads to get there.

- Paul

Lowering the speed limits on streets by using only signs is mostly useless unless they redesign the streets as well. If the street "feels" like it we can drive at a higher speed, they will.

Why do we put up signs saying "speed cameras"? They will only slow down until they get past the camera and then increase their cars' speed to over the limit because of "feel" of the street.

 

[picard102]

I wonder on a pedestrian per capita basis what the change is?

You'll probably see it relatively stable with a slight decrease. But yearly population data is hard to come by and so you kind of have to guess.
I'm not a statistician, but some quick excel math suggests a -19% drop per-capita since 2011.

 

[crs1026]

Lowering the speed limits on streets by using only signs is mostly useless unless they redesign the streets as well. If the street "feels" like it we can drive at a higher speed, they will.

Why do we put up signs saying "speed cameras"? They will only slow down until they get past the camera and then increase their cars' speed to over the limit because of "feel" of the street.

The sign we put up locally is nothing compared to the flourescent panels and vehicle striping and even pennants on poles that I have seen elsewhere. In those places, if you missed the warnings, you were clearly inattentive and deserved the consequences.

In Ireland, my Garmin GPS even warned me about speed camera locations.

Slowing drivers through a single marked zone is better than nothing, I suppose. Possibly undermines the urgency habit a touch - and if the zone matters (eg at a school) a well marked speed camera does offer improved compliance - otherwise drivers may take their foot off the gas but only pretend to slow down.

- Paul

 

[W. K. Lis]

Road safety is low in priority in Toronto...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1608569446318186503

 

[W. K. Lis]

This article is base on American information, but still reverent to Canadians.

Many More Children Die from Road Violence than Gun Violence​

From link.

Even with the awful 2020 spike in firearm deaths of U.S. youths, more than twice as many pre-teen children die from traffic violence as from gun violence​

U.S. gun deaths increased sharply in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, with the rise so steep among young people that the National Institutes of Health issued a bulletin this July calling gun violence “the leading cause of childhood death.”

That framing has been catching fire. In a major ad campaign, New York State’s largest healthcare provider, Northwell Health, has been calling out guns as “The #1 Killer of Kids.” Earlier this month the New York Times devoted its Sunday magazine to portraits of children killed by gun violence, which the paper described as “the leading cause of death for American kids.”

The scourge of gun deaths of young people absolutely warrants a full-court press from U.S. media and health officials and providers. But that’s no less true for motor vehicles, considering that cars and other motorized traffic are still far and away the biggest killer of U.S. kids — “kids” as society has traditionally defined them: persons younger than the teenage years.

 

[TTCdinosaur]

I have a few co-workers who have remarked that they get home on Sunday and don't leave until the following Saturday. Although those comments are from the suburbs, it wouldn't surprise me if that was replicated across a significant part of the population regardless of where they live. Who knows, just a thought.

We know foot traffic is down downtown. WFH often does not include walks around the block - more DoorDash than anything.

Not meaning I was surprised really, certainly not new information - more - gosh, it really is those places.

The quandry for me (Your list of factors is quite spot on, I thought) was - how much of this is changeable purely through road redesign and physical change, versus how much of it can only be changed by changing behaviour.

The change factors that I would credit some success this year (having no data to support, purely an observation) are

a) the staggered walk-before-green timing change is an improvement and is training drivers to give way before making turns
b) the renewal of visible police enforcement is creating deterrence
c) attitudes and expectations about speed and travel time are slowly changing... the percent of drivers who accept the need for patience and who give themselves more time to get places has risen a bit.
d) lowering speed limits on many streets

Physical road redesign is great idea but works slowly given budgets etc. Needs to be done, but there have to be drivers accepting different ways to drive on existing roads to get there.

- Paul

A) has been great, but now I see cars making the right with a lot of speed during the few ms before the advanced pedestrian light goes.

Toronto is car city, at the end of the day.

 

[W. K. Lis]

We know foot traffic is down downtown. WFH often does not include walks around the block - more DoorDash than anything.



A) has been great, but now I see cars making the right with a lot of speed during the few ms before the advanced pedestrian light goes.

Toronto is car city, at the end of the day.

That's why the corner radius need to be narrowed to slow cars down when turning.

Run for Your Life When a Traffic Engineer Wants to Make a Road More “Safe”​

From link.

Conventional traffic engineers (the people who have been designing our roads for the past century) often like to make the claim that their design strategy is to make the road more “safe.” The tragic irony is that a great many of their “safety” tactics actually make the road much less safe.

And that helps explain why today, we have an epidemic of unsafe, inattentive motorists driving at excessively dangerous speeds. What could be more ironic?

Here is an excellent, common example of how our roads become less safe in the name of “improved safety”:

A road intersection have what are called a “turning (or “curb”) radius.” This radius is a measurement of the tightness or width of the corner of the intersection. The following image illustrates a tight radius vs a wide radius…

Too often, the conventional traffic engineer will recommend a wider turn radius for “safety.” He or she will frequently state that a wider radius is needed to help improve pedestrian safety. Without a wider radius – the engineer will often claim—motorists will sometimes jump the curb, which would endanger pedestrians.

Nonsense.

What actually happens in the real world is that the wider radius allows most motorists to negotiate the turn at a much higher (and more inattentive) speed, and there is very little that is more dangerous than a motorist driving at excessive speeds inattentively. If a motorist “jumping the curb” was truly a problem, hardened bollards should be placed at the curb to to punish or otherwise discourage reckless, excessively speeding driving.

Another canard that the engineer often pulls out is that the wider radius is needed because the road is used by very large vehicles (such as buses or trucks). The large vehicle becomes what is called the “design vehicle” that the engineer uses to design the road geometries.

But again, the unintended consequence emerges. By enabling the large vehicle to negotiate a turn with a wider turn radius, we induce the high-speed, inattentive driving by the much more common passenger vehicle. Overall safety goes down as a result, because while a large truck jumping a curb is perhaps averted by the wide radius, such vehicles are quite rare, whereas the smaller passenger vehicles which are induced to drive more recklessly are much more common.

In a walkable downtown, it is ass backwards to use a large vehicle as the design vehicle for designing the streets. The pedestrian should be the design “vehicle” if a town center is to be designed for walkability. Using a large vehicle as the design vehicle utterly undercuts the objective of creating a safe, walkable street design for pedestrians.

There are much more appropriate strategies for dealing with large vehicles in a town center that is intended to be walkable. First, the effective turn radius can be made wider without creating the unintended consequences I mention above. This can be done quite simply by adding on-street parking close to the intersection. Or, the community can prohibit the use of large vehicles in the town center.

When conventional traffic engineers mention “safety,” watch out. Usually, it is just a smoke screen to grab the moral high ground at a public meeting concerning street design. Meanwhile, the man behind the curtain that we are not supposed to notice is designing the street for a single-minded objective: Higher motor vehicle speeds — which, of course, degrades our safety and quality of life.

Tactics such as wider intersection turn radii usually fall under the category of the conventional “forgiving street” philosophy, whereby we “forgive” reckless, high-speed, out of control driving by eliminating things that motorists might run into, such as trees, pedestrians, buildings, parked cars, etc.

Truck aprons accommodate large vehicles while slowing turning speeds of typical vehicles (Portland, OR).

Mountable Truck Apron​

From link.

While bicyclist and pedestrian safety is negatively impacted by wide crossings at intersections, these users are also at risk if the curb radius is too small. This can result in the rear wheels of a large vehicle tracking over queuing areas at the corner. Mountable truck aprons are a solution that can reduce turning speeds for passenger vehicles while accommodating the off-tracking of larger vehicles where a larger corner radius is necessary. Mountable truck aprons are part of the traveled way and as such should be designed to discourage pedestrians or bicyclists from using them as a safe queuing area. Bicycle stop bars, detectable warning surfaces, traffic signal equipment, and other intersection features must be located behind the mountable surface area. The mountable surface should be visually distinct from the adjacent travel lane, sidewalk and bike facility. The height of the mountable areas and curbs should not exceed 3 inches above the travel lane to accommodate lowboy trailers.

 

[picard102]

traffic violence

So is this what we're calling traffic accidents now to make the problem seem more sinister so we can compare it to actual violent crimes?

 

[W. K. Lis]

So is this what we're calling traffic accidents now to make the problem seem more sinister so we can compare it to actual violent crimes?

"Traffic accidents" are not accidents. Some "traffic collisions" can be very violent crimes.

 

[crs1026]

So is this what we're calling traffic accidents now to make the problem seem more sinister so we can compare it to actual violent crimes?

I don’t like the use of sensationalism in making an argument either ….. but if you can think of a better term to describe unnecessary harm to human beings that is routinely ignored or knowingly institutionalised into our lifestyle and culture, give it a shot.

Certainly, a harsher term than “accident” is justified.

- Paul

 

[Admiral Beez]

This almost happens to me at least a few times a month when I drive south on Sackville St. at Gerrard.

I’ll have a green light and begin to enter Gerrard St. when a westbound cyclist will just go straight through the red light and cross Sackville. The east facing visibility is poor so if you’re not expecting a wayward cyclist you could easily drive straight into them as they converge with the car. Having two plus decades driving experience at this intersection I know to slow down when southbound on Sackville when approaching the green light at Gerrard, since I know a cyclist is likely to roll across my path at the last second.

I wonder if It’s because of all the intersections between River and Parliament, Sackville is the only signalled southbound street, meaning that only here will a westbound cyclist who ignores the rules face automobiles proceeding perpendicularly through with full ROW.

 

[picard102]

"Traffic accidents" are not accidents.

So you're position is that they are intentional?
That people are premeditatively going out in their cars to kill children, often their own as passengers, in the same way that someone goes out and shoots up a school?