Toronto Star coverage of traffic enforcement in Toronto

In my old Takoma DC neighborhood, there is a lot of hand-wringing over a traffic accident earlier in the week that resulted in death.

The thing about DC and driving is that it is a city that is relatively dense, organized in a street grid, and while people complain that the avenues are particularly wide, many of the streets are narrow.

Plus most of the city has a 25 mph speed limit, and there is talk of reducing this to 20 mph in residential areas.

Update crash with entrapment Blair Rd & Aspen St NW. All patients extricated. 1 adult male & 1 adult female transported critical injuries. 1 child transported critical injuries. Sadly, we have 1 adult deceased on the scene. pic.twitter.com/I1Xh3s3sj7

— DC Fire and EMS (@dcfireems) December 17, 2019

Narrow streets mean that motor vehicle traffic moves more slowly, generally, but that isn't always the case on the very wide arterials.

Pennsylvania Avenue is so wide they put a cycletrack in the middle, and it still has four lanes on each side.

Photo: Tom Brenner, New York Times.

Because in the city most traffic moves slowly, as a result, most of the serious traffic crashes not on freeways, especially those causing death, almost always are the result of reckless driving.

Even though we can take pride in a relatively low rate of death and injury from crashes, there are plenty of opportunities for improvements:

-- "Updating Vision Zero approaches," 2016
-- Toward Zero Deaths National Strategy on Highway Safety, Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota
-- "First global benchmark for road safety in cities published by International Transport Forum," 2018
-- "A more radical approach to "Vision Zero" is needed: reconstructing streets out of different materials to reduce speeds," 2019

Reckless driving was the case of the one on Blair Road, where the driver who died was both speeding and weaving in and out of traffic ("Woman killed and three injured, including a child, in Northwest D.C. collision," Washington Post).  Although Blair Road has some particular design characteristics that encourage "race car" like behavior.  The city is addressing that, but it will be 2-3 more years before the change is actually constructed.

Need for differentiated driving behavior: one mode for cities; another mode for suburbs (and freeways).  One of the problems in cities with a lot of commuter traffic from the suburbs is that suburban drivers don't seem to know how to drive in a differentiated fashion, driving in a manner appropriate to the city in DC, and fast with few cares in the suburbs, where speed limits are higher, and there are few pedestrians.

(What I recommended on the list was that Advisory Neighborhood Commissions with committees focused on transportation should ask for the regular receipt of data on crashes within their geographic purview, and in conjunction with representatives from Planning, the police department, Transportation, and other representatives look for opportunities to make structurally-related recommendations and improvements. The Blair Road incident is the result of some peculiar elements that the city is addressing indirectly, by removing a lane and replacing it with a cycletrack. This will be an extremely positive traffic calming measure. But it won't happen for a couple more years.)

Infographic produced by Walk Denver in support of a planning initiative in the West Colfax neighborhood.

Planning and advocacy improvements.  Some cities have exemplary advocacy groups addressing walking and urban design, not just biking.  Examples of great programs include Feet First in Seattle, Walk Boston, Walk Denver, and Starkville (Mississippi) In Motion.

And even in the city we can argue that the mobility network is designed primarily for the automobile and steps need to be taken to rebalance mobility practice towards sustainable modes: that is walking, biking, transit, and other forms of micromobility.

In my writings about DC as two cities: the core or inner city and the outer city; I make this distinction because the outer city is dominated by the car and there is much less walking and biking there.  More importantly, most of the city's elected officials live in the Outer City so even if they don't think so, their mental schemas for mobility are shaped and dominated by the car. 

Toronto Star data-based reporting.  The Toronto Star has been reporting/campaigning about pedestrian-related crashes and deaths for a few years, and has ramped up coverage more recently.

 The current round of reporting is pretty unique in that it looks at data on traffic enforcement statistics by the police department. I don't believe I've seen a similar kind of reporting elsewhere.

The twitter feed of reporter Ed Tubb has a lot of great graphics.

The two charts are from "140,000 fewer speeding charges. How Toronto police traffic tickets fell by two-thirds, even as deaths spiked" which is a data-focused piece building on earlier coverage, including "The Toronto Police Service has never charged fewer drivers with a criminal offence, new data shows."

Another great graphic from Ed Tubb:

Other coverage, including opinion columns, includes:

-- "U of T expert attributes ‘dozens of deaths’ to decline in Toronto police traffic ticketing"
-- "Shawn Micallef: Toronto police gaslighted us on traffic enforcement. Their neglect put lives at risk"
-- "Emma Teitel: Why even have crosswalks when Toronto drivers are allowed to ignore them?"
-- "How not to hit a pedestrian in Toronto" -- what a great subhead -- "With the right habits, it shouldn’t be difficult to avoid hitting a Toronto pedestrian (or a convenience store), experts say"

The Teitel piece is accompanied by this photo, of cars stopped in the crosswalk at a red light. I take photos of these kinds of acts all the time.