Feb 01, 2022 in News Car Accident

Car Accident: Toronto Continues to Struggle with Road Safety

As Toronto personal injury lawyers, our team meets and gets to know a lot of car accident victims. Collisions happen every day in our city, and when serious injuries occur Torontonians know to contact Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers for compassionate and dedicated legal representation.

During our many years working with seriously injured accident victims, we’ve learned a lot about what causes traffic accidents and how they can be better avoided. That’s why, when the City of Toronto announced its ‘Vision Zero’ long-term road safety plan, we were big proponents of the strategy. Vision Zero, which has a stated goal of eliminating traffic deaths, has helped cities around the world drastically reduce fatalities through a variety of proactive, progressive safety measures. In Toronto, enacted measures have included adding new bike lanes, issuing speeding tickets through photo radar cameras, installing advanced walk signals for pedestrians, reducing speed limits on some local roads, adding school safety zones, piloting left-turn speed bumps, and more.

Unfortunately, these measures have failed to meaningfully curb traffic fatalities or serious injuries. Both metrics fell to ten-year lows in 2020 amid the first round of COVID-19 lockdowns, but 2021 saw at least 58 traffic fatalities and 183 serious injuries. 

“What actually happened this year has been a rebound,” University of Toronto urban planning professor Matti Siemiatycki told CBC News Toronto. “It’s showed us that what is going to really be required is a much more significant transformation and one that will take both technical expertise and political will.”

Though the city’s transportation services division told the CBC that “sustainable results are often not immediate” and that “the success of Vision Zero depends on long-term behavioural, cultural and structural changes,” safety advocates, including some personal injury lawyers, believe that more urgent action is required. That means narrowing streets, implementing much broader speed limit reductions, expanding pedestrian and cyclist spaces, and more; initiatives that are politically toxic in some circles, but which are proven to reduce traffic fatalities. 

As personal injury lawyers, our job is to help seriously injured accident victims access the benefits and/or compensation that they deserve for their injuries. In a perfect world, programs like Vision Zero would drastically reduce the number of car, truck, and bike accident victims we represent. But until that vision becomes a reality, we’ll be here to ensure that accident victims have access to the resources they need to fund their recoveries.

If you’ve been injured in a traffic accident, contact Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers today to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation. Our experienced team will listen to your story, assess the viability of your claim, and lay out the next steps in your legal journey.

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