Editorial lacks heat, trivializes recent deaths

I was truly disappointed reading your recent editorial - long on polemic; embarrassingly short on coherent analysis. Lacking in knowledgeable facts, The Mirror's editorial writer offers heat but no light.

As a former member of the Toronto Pedestrian Committee, I have to say the editorial's lack of cogent reasoning imperils all users of our public streets. To declare, for example, "Parkdale-High Park Councillor Bill Saundercook's push to lower speed limits in the city is not the answer" reveals an extraordinary deficit in understanding what happens when a motor vehicle hits a pedestrian.

At 80 kilometres per hour, 80 in 100 pedestrians hit by a car will die. At 60 km/hr, 40 in 100 pedestrians hit by a car will die. At 40 km/hr, five in 100 pedestrians hit by a car will die. Research has also clearly shown that the higher the vehicular speed, the more car drivers think our streets belong exclusively to them.

Nowhere does your editorial address the past 50-plus years during which many of our densely populated neighbourhood streets were turned into four-lane highways. Formerly pedestrian-friendly residential streets were turned into arterial roads designed to encourage high vehicular speeds and volumes with little to no regard for those on foot.

It has been this long-standing public policy that has allowed motor vehicles to tyrannize our streets.

These 14 pedestrian deaths are mute testimony to the desperate need to correct this one-sided policy. They also speak to the new reality that the suburbs are becoming urbanized.

Your editorial further exacerbates the dangers to pedestrians when it uses the police blitz as an exemplar of "effective tools." Put in its most direct form, a few days a year are devoted to enforcement while the rest of the time it's business as usual.

Even the most rudimentary understanding of human behaviour dispels naivete when it comes to the so-called value of this hoary blitz practice. It is also enormously ironic the police aid and abet illegal conduct by allowing motorists to exceed the posted legal speed limit under the specious guise of keeping the traffic moving.

Are drivers not supposed to know the rules of the road before they are licensed and have the privilege to drive?

In its most unvarnished terms, the police are employed to enforce the law, not act as surrogate teachers. They have subsumed this gross perversion of their primary sworn duty to our society and we are now paying a heavy price with the deaths of innocent people.

With only a veneer of objectivity, The Mirror's editorial is a disservice to our many citizens and a sad eulogy for these dead pedestrians. To then repeat inane nostrums as a remedy for this carnage serves no one. Indeed, the editorial trivializes all these deaths by saying these numbers are "very low in comparison to other municipalities."

Please, base editorials on more than predisposition and speculation. We deserve nothing less from our newspapers.

William E. Brown