Item - 2019.IE3.9

That the Infrastructure and Environment Committee:

1.   Directed the General Manager, Transportation Services to report back in the second quarter 2019 with a Vision Zero 2.0 Road Safety Plan with recommendations, including but not limited to:

a. Lower speed limits on strategic arterial, collector and local roads across the city.

b. Introduce more mid-block and upgrade intersection crossings.

c. Recommend appropriate, safer road design, including protected intersections.

d. Significantly increase the number of red light cameras.

e. Expedite automated speed enforcement implementation.

I know you share my determination to make our streets safer.

The number of pedestrian and cyclist deaths in our city is absolutely unacceptable, especially when so many of them are preventable.

In 2018, there were 41 pedestrian fatalities in Toronto. And of those, 16 were in Scarborough – meaning that nearly 40 per cent of all pedestrian fatalities occurred in Scarborough alone.

Following my request for a detailed analysis of the Scarborough fatalities, City staff reported that Scarborough has the most arterial roads in the city – roads with four or more lanes of traffic and a speed limit of 60 kilometres per hour or higher. Scarborough also has the longest walking distances between protected, safe crossings compared to the rest of the city; pedestrians have to walk up to six additional minutes to use a safe crossing compared to residents of Toronto and East York.

Many of these collisions happened either in the middle of these roads or at intersections where vehicles were speeding through red lights. We know that the wider the road, the longer the distances between signals and crosswalks, the more likely a driver is to speed.

While the numbers were higher in Scarborough last year, similar conditions exist in other areas of the City, and we have seen an unacceptable number of pedestrian and cyclist deaths across Toronto.

This is why I support bringing forward a Vision Zero 2.0 plan with recommendations including but not limited to:

•  Lower speed limits on strategic arterial roads across the city.
•  Introduce more mid-block crossings.
•  Recommend appropriate, safer road design.
•  Significantly increase the number of red light cameras.
•  Expedite automated speed enforcement implementation.

I believe it is appropriate for your committee to lead this charge to update and improve our City's Vision Zero approach. I look forward to supporting you in those efforts to make our streets safer and, ultimately, save lives.

I hope that you will also join me in continuing to fight for automated speed enforcement on our roads. I will be pushing Provincial regulators and our own staff to ensure that speed cameras are deployed in school and community safety zones across the city as soon as possible. Consideration of this initiative has been going on for an undue period of time and I hope we can bring it to an end and get on with implementing a tool which will significantly contribute to safety on our streets.

We can, and must, do more to keep people safe on our roads, and I believe the majority of Torontonians understand these are some of the changes we must make at this juncture to place safety first in our growing city.

Thank you for adding this letter to the committee agenda and for your ongoing work on this important file.