Toronto could pass the largest road safety budget in Vision Zero history

Toronto could increase spending on its traffic safety program by about 25 per cent at the end of the month as it continues to grapple with dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries on its streets each year.

City authorities are asking councilors to approve the largest-ever budget for the Vision Zero strategy, created in 2016 to eliminate all road deaths. Staff want to increase spending to $99 million from nearly $80 million this year as they step up work to improve intersections, install more traffic calming measures and double the number of automatic speed cameras.

While fatalities and injuries have declined since the program’s inception, Vision Zero’s latest annual report comes after 46 people, including pedestrians, cyclists and drivers, have been killed on Toronto’s roads this year.

“It’s really hard to talk about dead or seriously injured in the statistics,” said Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie, chairwoman of the city’s infrastructure committee. “These are people. And these are people who have not returned home to their families, or people who will never be the same after a terrible event.”

The commission greenlit the additional spending this week but will still require final city council approval at the end of this month.

According to the plan, the number of speed cameras will increase to 150

Under the plan, the city will more than double the number of speed cameras in Toronto from 75 to 150 in early 2025. Most of the city’s current speed cameras are relocated twice a year. Barbara Gray, the city’s general manager of transportation services, said the 25 new cameras would be permanently installed in high-collision areas.

These cameras provide the city with tens of millions in ticket revenue each year. But Gray defended their use as a security tool rather than a revenue source for Toronto.

“Our goal would be for the cameras to generate no revenue at all because people wouldn’t be speeding,” she said. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened so far, but we’re hopeful that as we continue to develop the program, we’ll really start to see that impact.”

The plan also assumes that employees will continue their long-standing efforts to lower the speed limit on local roads throughout the city to 30 km/h. So far, this has been done in 15 of the city’s 25 precincts, and two more precincts will be changed every year until 2028. The transition takes four to six months in each precinct because workers must install between 500 and 1,000 new signs.

The city will also implement hundreds of other traffic calming measures, including an estimated 735 speed bumps next year and 810 in 2026.

“We know speed is such a huge issue,” Gray said. “A lot of our tools support velocity management… So we know that the toolkit that we’re using at Vision Zero is the right toolkit.”

The number of injuries has increased in recent years

Since the program began eight years ago, the number of deaths and injuries on Toronto’s roads has been declining. In 2016, 78 people were killed and 337 were injured. In 2023, the last year for which complete data is available, 45 people were killed and 294 injured.

Despite the overall decline, Coun. Dianne Saxe said she was concerned about the number of injuries sustained on city roads in recent years. These numbers increased between 2021 and 2023, from 241 to 294.

“We are absolutely gaining dollar value. I have no doubt about that,” she said about Vision Zero’s expenses, adding that increasing the program’s budget is justified.

“We feel that people feel that because there are heavy traffic jams, they have the right to take shortcuts, break the rules, run red lights, drive on the sidewalks, race whenever they see an open space, and they do not take into account who will pay the price ” – she added.

But the county. Anthony Perruzza said that while the work – and spending – to reduce dangerous driving habits is important, public education to ensure pedestrians and cyclists are careful on city streets is also important.

“It’s really, really hard to fix stupidity,” Perruzza said of distracted pedestrians who often talk on cell phones. “You have a 2,000-pound vehicle and you meet it on foot, you meet it on a bicycle, or otherwise, you lose.”