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rfmcdonaldI like Spacing Toronto, but there are some posts, like the one Dylan Reid made last Thursday ("Why did the police take aim at pedestrians?") which annoy me profoundly. As you might know, the month of Janaury 2010 in Toronto was marked by an anomalously high number of pedestrian deaths as a result of collisions with motor vehicles. As I blogged a couple of weeks ago that may well be an entirely normal statistical blip that can happen any time. Reid, however, is unhappy with the police reaction.
He goes so far as to say that a Toronto police officer's statement that a woman hit by a bus should have been watching where she was going was unfair.
All I can say to all this is that, regardless of legalities, everyone on the roads--pedestrians, cyclists, motor vehicle drivers--should be paying attention to their surroundings, even when they're doing things correctly. I don't see any grounds for saying that pedestrians do a good job of obeying the rules and being safe. How many times have you seen (or been) rushing across the street in the hopes of making the traffic, even hanging around on the centre line while waiting for the other lane to clear? Pedestrians walk without taking care; cyclists bike through pedestrian traffic and don't signal; cars and trucks are driven by people who sometimes don't look for smaller people and things nearby.
These collisions are all a matter of kinetic energies, really, and it's just that people are so much more fragile than things made of metal, especially heavy things. Since when have caution and prudence been bad things? Blitz pedestrians, blitz cyclists, blitz drivers, blitz everyone who isn't being sufficiently safe, but identifying one class as especially culpable is foolish.
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.
The police campaign consciously shifted the blame-game towards pedestrians. This strategy ignored the fact that many of the pedestrians killed in January were behaving in a legal and responsible manner when they were killed by vehicles. Instead, it reassured drivers that they did not need to examine or change their own behaviour, relieving them of responsibility. By trivializing the causes of the deaths as “those crazy pedestrians,” it threatened to derail a developing and constructive discussion about how Toronto intersections can be made safer. And it portrayed walking itself as an unsafe activity.
He goes so far as to say that a Toronto police officer's statement that a woman hit by a bus should have been watching where she was going was unfair.
All I can say to all this is that, regardless of legalities, everyone on the roads--pedestrians, cyclists, motor vehicle drivers--should be paying attention to their surroundings, even when they're doing things correctly. I don't see any grounds for saying that pedestrians do a good job of obeying the rules and being safe. How many times have you seen (or been) rushing across the street in the hopes of making the traffic, even hanging around on the centre line while waiting for the other lane to clear? Pedestrians walk without taking care; cyclists bike through pedestrian traffic and don't signal; cars and trucks are driven by people who sometimes don't look for smaller people and things nearby.
These collisions are all a matter of kinetic energies, really, and it's just that people are so much more fragile than things made of metal, especially heavy things. Since when have caution and prudence been bad things? Blitz pedestrians, blitz cyclists, blitz drivers, blitz everyone who isn't being sufficiently safe, but identifying one class as especially culpable is foolish.
