Our tolerance of road deaths makes me think of that saying, "one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic". If road deaths were rare like airplane deaths, we'd be horrified at the rare occasions where roadway deaths did occur. A single pedestrian death would be national news for a week...

I imagine this would all be settled in court. That would be up for a judge to decide and set precedents. Presumably, the municipality would not be responsible in cases of drunk drivers. That seems sensible. On the other hand, if there's a segment of road that regularly has crashes, and the...

Just to be clear, all I'm suggesting is that as a general principal, municipalities should be held financially liability for their negligent road designs leading to injury/death. Lawyer and economists and all those smart people would be better positioned to hammer out details like this. I don't...

Honestly, excluding any exceptional circumstances, I’d ban left turns on all streetcar routes 24/7.

As far as I’m aware, I’ve never seen an insurance company sue for negligent road designs. I’m assuming they would if they could. Any idea if municipalities are somehow shielded from liability?

We'd have safer roads virtually overnight if insurance companies regularly took municipalities to court over their roadway designs, and could get proper compensation.

But who is paying for the social and financial costs of roadways deaths? The people that are building, operating and maintaining these roadways have little incentive to improve the status quo, unless themselves or their organization(s) personally have to bare financial and social the costs of...

I find it curious how in other fields of engineering there is virtually zero tolerance for risk to life, while with roads and other civil infrastructure, we find death to be a totally acceptable risk of use. Perhaps that's a cultural attitude that needs to be revisited. After all, there is no...

Some members here suggest that it might be pushed back to accommodate the Ontario Line construction, and I tend to agree with them. Is there time to get the King Street upgrades complete, before the real heavy impacts of Ontario Line construction begins? But on there other hand, perhaps the...

Indeed this concept is very similar to the carbon tax imposed on polluting industry (although I would not publicly market it that way, for PR reasons). Polluters didn't care about polluting because polluting costs them nothing. If we attach a fee to the pollution, suddenly businesses have a...

Do you guys think holding municipalities financially responsible for negligent road design leading to death would be an effective way to improve road safety? Infrastructure design is a contributing factor in many (if not most) road deaths, so I don’t see why municipalities should be able to...

The City seems to think that “temporary” means that it never needs to be maintained.

It’s because we’re all used to austerity. So even something pretty basic (like money for a decent downtown transport network) seems like a massive ask. This is also a side effect of the City of Toronto not having the revenue tools to deliver services to an urban area or 6.5 Million people...

On top of this, I would outright ban left turns along St. Clair and Spadina. Those streetcar routes might actually have decent performance, if not for all the left turning cars blocking them. But, as you mentioned, this would require depending of our car-centric mentality.

I made this thread dedicated RapidTO network-wide improvements for streetcar operations, so we don't have to pollute the King Street thread: https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/rapidto-citywide-streetcar-priority-city-of-toronto-ttc.34289/

There's a lot of discussion in the King Transit Priority thread about citywide improvements to streetcar operations. I've created this thread to consolidate those discussions. As it turns out, the City of Toronto and Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) are currently studying RapidTO, which is an...

I mean, cheap is relative. Streetcar network upgrades would probably have much better bang-for-buck than most of our other transit investments. A fraction of the financial investment we've been making in GO RER and network operations would do wonders for the Toronto streetcar network. And...

Honestly I think the entire steeetcar network needs a modernization to improve speed and reliability, and get it to the operational level of something like the Finch LRT. Wider stop spacing, upgrading to double-point switches, multi-directional trams, parking removal, bike lane expansion...

Streetcars still move pretty slowly on King, tbh. The stop spacing is part of that.

Interesting. Is this the work of the restaurant lobby?