Quote of the day: cars and pedestrians

There's an article, "Push. Pray. Walk: After yet another death, should Toronto replace these dangerous pedestrian crossovers?," in the Toronto Star about pedestrian crossings--not full traffic signals--and how there are plenty of close calls, and deaths from time to time. I like this particular paragraph.

Much of Toronto’s pedestrian infrastructure — and this goes for bike infrastructure too — was seemingly designed with the idea that the city’s drivers would have some baseline level of aptitude and care. Maybe that was always naïve. Maybe driver behaviour has just gotten worse in recent years.

Either way, the aptitude and care aren’t there.

The first paragraph called out to me, but these are good too.

We can debate the nature of the problem — I tend to think one root cause is a driver education system that licenses too many people without adequate training — but regardless, the response from city hall needs to be about emphasizing infrastructure that protects and separates pedestrians and cyclists from cars. That means red lights that enforce a stop instead of crossovers that are treated as optional, and concrete barriers instead of paint.

A lot of drivers aren’t going to like that — they already complain that there are too many traffic lights and lane restrictions as it is — but the reality, I fear, is that road safety measures that rely on driver responsibility are banking on an unrealistic expectation. Toronto’s bad drivers have shattered that basic trust too many times.