A pedestrian was hit by a car on Parkside Drive last night
Parkside has been at the centre of Toronto’s road safety debate. Its speed camera was cut down seven times in less than a year
Shortly after Premier Doug Ford’s speed camera ban took effect, a pedestrian was struck by a driver last night on Parkside Drive in Roncesvalles, close to where a couple was killed by a speeding driver on the same street in 2021. (Superior Court Justice Suhail Akhtar called that fatal 2021 crash “a crime of stupidity.”)
According to the local advocacy group Safe Parkside, a driver was turning at the intersection of Parkside and Howard Park Avenue around 6 p.m. last night when they hit a pedestrian, who was taken to hospital.
Related: No one hates speed cameras more than Doug Ford
“This predictable and preventable incident occurred less than two weeks after Doug Ford and the Ontario Conservatives put an end to speed cameras across the province,” said a post on the organization’s Instagram page. “Shame on the City of Toronto for their decades of inaction and shame on Doug Ford for siding with speeders and vandals over the advice of school boards, police chiefs and doctors from the Hospital for Sick Children.”
In July, a study published by SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University found that the cameras had reduced speeding by 45 per cent in school zones and other safety priority areas. It also found that speed cameras slow the majority of drivers’ maximum speed by more than 10 kilometres per hour.
Despite this, Ford called Ontario’s speed cameras a “cash grab” and banned them. In place of speed cameras, the provincial government allocated $210 million to road safety initiatives including speed bumps and improved signage. Toronto received its speed limit signs intended for school zones this week, but they’re massive and do not fit on the city’s poles. Some have also expressed concern that the large signs could create unsafe road conditions by causing blind spots.
It has not yet been confirmed whether last night’s accident was caused by excessive speed. It occurred just north of where Parkside’s speed camera was previously placed.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
