North York Community Council passed a motion on Thursday to reduce the speed limit to 30 km/h on 62 streets throughout Leaside.
“It’s unprecedented the number of streets that we proposed,” said Jaye Robinson, the councillor who presented the motion to Council. “It was a big undertaking. Many of us worked on this for months and it went through unanimously.”
At Thursday’s Council meeting, one speaker who spoke in favour of the reduction was Jillian Walsh. She’s the mother of Georgia Walsh, the seven-year-old girl who was fatally struck by a van near her Leaside home in 2014.
“She talked about her daughter, not being a number and not being a statistic, but being a person. And she humanized the conversation (Thursday) at North York Community Council by really courageously articulating what their family has gone through with this tragic loss,” Robinson said.
“You could have heard a pin drop in the chamber.”
The motion is part of an overall traffic management plan for the midtown neighbourhood located in the Bayview and Eglinton area. In a letter submitted to the Council in late September, Robinson stated that Leaside has experienced a significant increase in cut-through traffic. She explained that the increase was partially due to the growing popularity of GPS navigation apps such as Waze.
This, in conjunction with drivers who travel at very high speeds, the lack of compliance with signage and high-traffic volume, has led to road safety concerns.
“Within the Traffic Management Plan, staff should consider both traffic control and traffic calming measures including all-way stop locations, turn restrictions, speed humps, and other options that will address vehicle speed, volume, congestion, and traffic infiltration issues,” Robinson said, noting that speed limit reduction is one of the most effective tools to improving road safety.
“All of our data suggests that excessive speeds are a leading contributing factor in serious injuries and fatalities on our roads,” she noted.
“A collision at 60 km/h has a 95 per cent likelihood of death compared to one at 40 km/h with a 30 per cent likelihood of death. At 30 km/h, that likelihood is all but eliminated.”
The Don Valley West councillor tells us that “not a day goes by” where she doesn’t get an email from Leaside residents who are concerned about road safety issues. To date, more than 1,700 Leaside residents have signed a petition in support of a 30 km/h speed limit.
“The most frequent complaints are speeding,” Carol Burtin Fripp, co-president of the Leaside Property Owners’ Association (LPOA) and chair of the LPOA’s Traffic Committee, confirmed.
She also notes how some drivers fail to obey signage, particularly during rush hours.
“Identifying where the problems are, and proposing what measures could be effective, these need not be expensive,” Fripp told Post City Magazines. “You can do a lot of street and intersection redesign with paint, and with planters, not necessarily only with physical measures.”
The LPOA responded to road safety concerns with a Traffic Calming Plan last December, which included physical measures (e.g. roadway changes), supplemented by traffic control devices (e.g. signs and markings), to help curb local traffic problems. Fripp believes that these initiatives are a good fit with the Leaside Traffic Management proposal, as well as Toronto’s Vision Zero Road Safety Plan.
Councillor Robinson first introduced Vision Zero in 2016. A renewed commitment to the plan – Vision Zero 2.0 – was introduced in June. It focuses on road safety through speed limit reductions, road design, and turning collisions at signalized intersections.
Robinson said that Leaside really mobilized around this vision.
“Now we’ve got a consistent message in Leaside that we want you to slow down,” Robinson said. “We’re telling the world that in Leaside we want the roads to be safe. This is a priority for Leaside, and (the) 1,700 people-plus who signed that petition, to send that message to City Hall. We won.”
Click here for the list of Leaside roads that will be included in the speed limit reduction.
