Pedestrian
March 10th, 2010
Anyone who doesn’t own a car, and the insurance that goes with it, is going to have fewer resources to deal with injuries if they are hit by a car, as a result of …
March 5th, 2010
EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Fullan, who teaches English and Civics at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school affiliated with the University of Toronto), organized the Jane’s Walk School Edition featured in the “Walking” column in the Summer-Fall 2009 issue of Spacing. He sent us this follow-up guest column with some further thoughts about what he and his students learned from the project.
On a sunny afternoon last spring, as part of a series of Jane’s Walks led by grade 7’s at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS), some of the kids I teach English to presented in front of a small audience just outside of Robarts Library. The students chose to animate a topic that had bugged them during their wanderings around campus earlier in the month, when twice they had found a conspicuous build up of litter on the pathways and lawns to the west of the giant library. Tossed bottles, loose paper, and fast food wrappers cluttered an otherwise inviting play or hang-out space. As the students addressed their audience, a boy stood on a bench and held up an empty Coke can as evidence. For the kids, aged 12 and 13, the solution to the litter problem was simple: more garbage cans please.
The walk was later featured in a Spacing article seen by a staffer at City Councillor Adam Vaughan’s office, who promptly sent a copy to the University of Toronto and asked them to put more garbage cans in the neglected area. When I told my students about how their observation had sparked this bit of political action, their reaction was again straightforward and enthusiastic: “That’s so cool!”
It is a pretty cool story, but it’s more than that. It’s also an example of the too rare phenomenon of youth engagement and involvement in the process of community planning and improvement.
March 4th, 2010
Talk about putting Toronto’s walking issues in perspective — Toronto cycling activist Hannah Evans recently moved to Amman, Jordan to work, and posted this fascinating blog post about walking in that city. …
February 9th, 2010
Intersections are inherently a competition for space and time. In many places in the world, intersections are still governed largely by the assertiveness of the participants. Crossing the street in many parts of Italy drivers will not stop unless you walk out onto the street. In orderly Toronto, the nature of intersections has been heavily institutionalized and regulated; we expressly decide which parties will have the priority at intersections in the city based on the importance we place on different modes of transportation.
While it is easy to argue that our society gives this priority to cars, Toronto is taking steps, albeit small ones, to shift its priorities and institutionalize intersections where transit and pedestrians are the primary focus.
Toronto began gradually implementing signal priority for streetcars along Queen Street in the mid 1980s and since then has expanded the program to 332 intersections across the city. You will likely experienced — possibly unknowingly — a handful of signal priority intersections if you travel on the Queen, King, College, St Clair, Dundas, Gerrard, Bathurst, and Spadina streetcars or Dufferin, Jane and Finch West buses. The city has the goal of implementing priority along one route every year and is currently working on Finch East. Bruce Zvaniga, at Transportation Services filled Spacing in on some of the details of how the signals work for transit vehicles.
As a streetcar (or equipped bus) approaches an intersection it is picked up as part of the control system’s loop. Upon detecting the transit vehicle, the system will hold its right of way for two second intervals, until the vehicle has passed. This can last a maximum of 30 seconds. If the vehicle is facing a red light the system can initiate the pedestrian countdown and shorten the opposing green up to 15 seconds.
February 4th, 2010
As pedestrian deaths started to mount to disturbing numbers in January, the response at first was a combination of concern, blame that was reasonably balanced between both drivers and pedestrians, and, occasionally, some thoughtful discussion.
Then, in the last week of January, the response suddenly changed for the worse. On Wednesday Jan. 27, Toronto woke up to radio, TV and newspapers saturated with stories about reckless pedestrians, and images of Toronto Police “blitzing” pedestrian behaviour in downtown Toronto. Suddenly it was pedestrians’ fault for getting themselves killed. While a few drivers were ticketed too, they were not emphasized in the stories.
What happened? The change in tone seems to have been a direct response to the police campaign. The first sign was a segment on CBC TV’s The National on Jan. 26, where the cameras were there to watch police warn pedestrians and then drive along with a policeman as he talked about reckless pedestrians. The next day, the stories focused on police stopping people on foot for various infractions in the downtown business district. They had plenty of quotes or clips from police representatives and the pedestrians being stopped, and not many from others. There was only minimal discussion about driver behaviour, mostly buried at the end of the stories.
Now that the deadly January and, I hope, the police crackdown are past, it’s a good time to look back and analyze the whole affair, one last time, in more depth. I’ve heard outrage from a lot of people about this police campaign, and it had various negative effects on pedestrianism in Toronto.
February 2nd, 2010
In this episode of Spacing Radio, we tackle the obstacles facing pedestrians and explore the forgotten, abandoned places in our midst. We begin with Spacing Magazine senior editor and co-chair …
February 1st, 2010
The Star Ferry passes in front of Hong Kong’s electric skyline
Hong Kong is a ceaselessly amazing case study in crowd management. With space at an absolute premium, central parts of the city have relegated the pedestrian environment upwards, in an effort to meet the needs of both pedestrians and the buses and taxis that monopolize the city’s roads. Pedestrian infrastructure here is a futuristic monument to efficiency.
While pedestrian overpasses are common throughout the city, the centrepiece of the system is found in the area simply referred to as “Central.” Here, the Hong Kong government has mandated new buildings be connected to the overpass system and throughout much of the central business district pedestrians come into little contact with the ground. It is Toronto’s PATH system realized in a warm climate. As with the PATH, some buildings are better at accommodating the pedestrian flow than others, and signage can be patchy. You can really only properly negotiate the system when you learn to stop looking for signs and just go with flow.
The most impressive part of the system, however, is clearly the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator.
January 27th, 2010
The Toronto Star today published an article on the front page, with the all-caps headline above the fold, “JAYWALKING CITY“.
In the article, the reporter stood on Yonge St. north of Front during lunch hour and watched people cross in the middle of the block. The reporter then wrote that this behaviour was illegal, and said as much to some of the pedestrians. The gist of the article was about all these pedestrians behaving illegally, and relating it to the rash of recent pedestrian deaths in the city.
One problem: Crossing mid-block is NOT illegal.
The reporter had the law wrong, and the basis of this story is false.
It is perfectly legal to cross the street mid-block in Toronto. The law says you can do it as long as you don’t interfere with traffic, and you’re not right beside a crosswalk.
Since there are lights at either end of that block, I’m guessing that there were plenty of gaps in traffic that the walkers used to cross safely. Furthermore, traffic in this area is dense and slow, which also makes it easy to cross without interfering with traffic. No doubt a few of these pedestrians forced cars to slow or stop to avoid hitting them — those few were indeed in breach of the bylaw. But the vast majority of pedestrians who cross mid-block wait for a gap, for the simple necessity of self-preservation.
The cutesy “info-graphic” that accompanied the story showed just how far off base the story was in its assumptions. Two of the four species of “illegal jaywalkers” described, the “peacock” and the “chicken”, are in fact crossing completely legally by waiting for a gap. The other two, the inattentive and the speedsters, aren’t necessarily illegal — it would depend on circumstances.
The reporter could have found out the real law easily. They could have called Toronto Police; they could have talked to the Star’s resident urbanist, Christopher Hume, who actually understands pedestrian issues; they could have talked to one of the five other Star reporters who have called me in the past two weeks and written good stories about pedestrian deaths; they could have called me, or any other pedestrian activist; they could have looked it up online; they could have talked to a lawyer. Instead, the Star put an article on the front page with no research, based on false assumptions, and disseminating a false interpretation of the law across Toronto.
January 27th, 2010
Last week, as pedestrian deaths in the GTA mounted, several media outlets asked me how I felt about this seeming epidemic. I generally replied that I was horrified.
I also tried to look for an explanation. After the tenth death in just over a week, I wrote a post last week wondering if perhaps a week of poor visibility was a factor. I hoped that a change in the weather would bring an end to these fatal accidents. I also wrote an op-ed in the Star pointing out that most of these collisions took place in the suburbs, where the infrastructure is often dangerous for pedestrians.
In the following 5 days, 3 more pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles, all within the boundaries of the old City of Toronto. It’s obviously more than just overcast weather and suburban infrastructure, hazardous as they are. There have now been 7 pedestrians killed in one month in Toronto, possibly the most ever in a single month since amalgamation. Another 7 have been killed in the GTA.
By this point, my feeling is shell-shock. I have no idea how to explain what is happening. It’s as if all possible causes of pedestrian deaths have come together at the same time: bad visibility; inattentive and aggressive drivers; heavy vehicles (5 or more of the 14 deaths); distracted pedestrians (for goodness’ sake, do not cross the street while talking on a cellphone); terrible infrastructure (the intersection of Danforth and Broadview, where a man was killed on Friday, is particularly bad for pedestrians - sweeping corners that allow vehicles to turn at speed).
There was no official response from the city to this tide of death until yesterday, when the Mayor answered questions about the deaths in a media scrum. The tragedy is that the City could have been putting pedestrian safety programs in place for several months now, and could have had the resources to respond immediately to the rising tide of tragedies.
January 26th, 2010
CBC’s The National for Jan. 26 just ran a segment on the wave of pedestrians killed by vehicles in the GTA in the past three weeks.
Without reference to the circumstances of the …
