Toronto Mayor John Tory thinks it's time to deliberately slow traffic on some city streets in the name of saving lives.
Tory plans to ask city staff to look at reducing speed limits on Toronto's arterial roads--ones that are at least four lanes wide, typically with a speed limit of at least 60 km/h. Tory will rely on experts to prescribe a lower, safer speed.
"I think the vast majority of Torontonians would say--people who drive and people who don't--that these are reasonable changes to propose making in the interest of keeping people alive and keeping people safe," Tory told reporters.
Tory also wants to explore installing more designated mid-block crossings, red-light cameras and head-start pedestrian signals.
While the mayor wants safety improvements across the city, in a Wednesday speech hosted by the Empire Club of Canada, he singled Scarborough out.
In 2018, crashes in Scarborough accounted for 30 per cent of the city's 41 fatal pedestrian collisions and 43 per cent of mid-block pedestrian fatalities. Pedestrians may be more likely to cross mid-block in Scarborough since the walk to safe crossing can be as much as six minutes longer than in Etobicoke or East York. City figures also show Scarborough has Toronto's highest proportion of roads with at least four lanes and with speed limits of 60 km/h or more.
"The wider the road, the wider the distances between signals and crosswalks, the more likely a driver is to speed," Tory said.
He thinks the city needs to do a better job of catching and punishing drivers who "disregard pedestrian safety and endanger others" with a lead foot.
It's part of why the mayor has been pushing the provincial government to grant Toronto permission to ticket drivers, not just register their speeds, with photo radar in school and community safety zones by September.
Statistics from a roving photo radar project produced some eye-popping results. 58% of drivers monitored on Rockcliffe Blvd were going faster than the street's 30 km/h speed limit. The pilot clocked a driver on Renforth Dr going 202 km/h in a 40 km/h zone
City of Toronto
Apart from road safety initiatives, Tory used his speech to introduce measures aimed at creating a "clean, prosperous" city.
The mayor plans to accelerate work to stop the flow of sewage into Lake Ontario, reducing the timeline from the project from 20 years to 10.
In November, Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxe found that sewage had overflowed into Ontario waterways 1,327 times between April 2017 and March 2018. Dozens of old municipal sewer systems were blamed for almost half of those instances.
Tory also intends to try to wake Toronto's wintertime economy up, exploring ways to host cold weather events that would draw out Torontonians and tourists alike. He is calling for a look at best practices around the world for night life year round.