Mock Turtle

Even when the circumstances in pedestrian deaths clearly point to driver error, Toronto police don’t hesitate to point the finger at the person who wasn’t behind the wheel of the vehicle:

Sgt. Tim Burrows said the victim was crossing slightly west of the crosswalk at the intersection.

“It’s difficult to determine who is at fault,” he said. But he added the pedestrian was crossing in a way that was “not predictable and not the safest place to be” but was walking on a green light.

“I’d rather just say that road safety is a shared responsibility and everyone has to do their part and abide by the laws and common sense.”

I’m sure that’s what he’d rather say, because to say otherwise would suggest that the pedestrian was not at fault and, like the vast majority of those struck down by cars in the last couple of weeks, had every right to expect to make it across the street alive if every user of the road was alert and obeying traffic law.

However, it’s just dishonest. If the pedestrian was crossing Davenport “slightly west of the crosswalk” while the car coming north on Symington was turning left, i.e. west, on a green light, the driver could not have been looking while making the turn or else she (as the story reports her to be) would have seen the pedestrian. Take a look at the intersection in Google Street View if you doubt me.

Comments sections of the major papers, always depressing, are full of self-righteous drivers who complain of pedestrians who “dart in or out of traffic.” Toronto police seem to have decided that, all evidence to the contrary, this “darting” phenomenon is the cause of pedestrian-car accidents and is pulling walkers aside to reprimand them for jay-walking — which, of course, is legal as long as you’re not right beside a crosswalk. Wouldn’t it make more sense to educate drivers on that point so they’re keeping an eye out for legal crossers? Perhaps the fact that most of the accidents have actually happened at crosswalks is telling? And I know it’s a lost cause, but perhaps some real, sustained traffic enforcement is a thought?

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They’re endangered.

From a BlogTO review of Te Aro:

This newish Leslieville cafe may not have a ton of tables to plunk a laptop, but the beauty of the space more than makes up for it.

What is so hard about turning it into English by adding “on which” before “plunk”, or even just “onto” after “tables”?

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The Star lovingly recreates Bryant’s last night as a man not under suspicion, while in the meantime, Partisan Hobo notes:

…there’s no PR firm to save the deceased man’s image. I don’t even know him, but I know he came from a broken home, that he is a visible minority, that he has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, that he’s the unmarried father of several children, that he had no formal “career”, that he had more than one interaction with police in more than one city prior to his death. None of this is really relevant to the public interest. Mostly it’s just prejudicial detail that helps some people imagine a man who lived on the edge and was bound to experience violence of some kind at some point.

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Everything about the recent cyclist death on Bloor is upsetting and horrific. Take first the location: Bloor St. outside Sephora, between Bay and Queen’s Park Circle, a pair of blocks everyone has walked along at some point and that were, at quarter to ten on a summer night, far from empty.

Take the absolute insanity of the car’s progression along Bloor, going at high speed the wrong way on the wrong side of the street and then onto the sidewalk to bang into whatever might detach the cyclist from the car’s side, all in front of horrified witnesses.

That is enough to make it one of the grisliest and most public deaths in the city in recent years. But then comes the fact that the driver, charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death, is the former attorney general of the province, responsible for, among other things, stricter legislation on street racing.

I’ve met Michael Bryant more than once. Smart, personable, perhaps somewhat arrogant, but with the drive and accomplishments to make that easier to swallow. I was warned he could be hard to work for — “a difficult boss” — but don’t imagine that description was meant to indicate anything more than impatience and the occasional outburst of bad temper.

I spent a couple of beer-soaked hours defending Bryant and his abilities to two less enamoured ex-Queen’s Park staffers a few months back. And I wrote this on Twitter when he was named CEO of Invest Toronto: “Bryant to Invest Toronto is good news for the city.”

This is upsetting and sad in every way. It’s sad for Darcy Allen Sheppard’s fiancee, children, friends and family. It’s sad for Michael Bryant’s wife and young children, whose lives are changed forever. It’s sad for the city of Toronto, which could have used the energy and drive that Bryant brought to his other portfolios. And it’s just sad in general, because no matter what the circumstances, and we’ll no doubt hear a lot more about them in the near future, no one should die the way that Darcy Allen Sheppard did.

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From the Fans of Toronto Public Library’s blog post on the renovated Bloor-Gladstone branch:

Realization

I have finally been able to put my finger on a thought that has half-occurred to me on my now-numerous visits to renovated libraries. Here’s a slogan to get you started: “Your tax dollars at work!” TPL keeps getting awarded modest increases in budget, even as it carries out budgetary trimming here and there, because we want to reward something that’s already working.

But what I’ve really been ruminating on is this idea. We live in a city that is otherwise so wedded to mediocrity it becomes indistinguishable from outright championing of mediocrity. Nonetheless, we build giant palaces to every form of learning, all free of charge and open to everybody. What we do here is we build palaces of learning. Ninety-nine of them. And when they wear out, we fix them. We throw good money after good because we think libraries are that important – which they are.

Toronto really does do a great job with libraries (see also: Runnymede branch, Jane-Dundas, Lillian H. Smith….). It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Metro Ref.

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I’m not sure how or when it happened, but at some point Toronto residents became the unhappiest and least pleasant people on the planet.

What’s behind the transformation? Is it the sudden growth in population through the last two decades that has made the city so miserable, or the proliferation of Tim Horton’s (Toronto was once almost Tim’s free) since the turn of the millennium?

What is it that makes Toronto residents today so very unpleasant? Well, there’s the extreme selfishness — the belief that each citizen in a large city should be able to get around without any impediment, and that your problem is never, ever mine.

There’s the non-stop intolerance, whether it’s of delayed streetcars, Tamil protesters, crowds –in a city, noise, weather (hot, cold, humid, dry), cyclists, car drivers, unionized workers, and most of all, each other.

And, of course, there’s the whining — or, more accurately, bitching and moaning, which better captures the anger underlying the whole thing — that never really stops, just redirects itself. As Christie Blatchford asks in this morning’s Globe, “who feels stressed out on the third day of any strike, you may well ask? Torontonians, that’s who.” The Star headline on TUESDAY claimed that parents were “desperate”. If one day of scrambling makes you “desperate”, what happens on day 10? In the 1970s, there was a lengthy TTC strike and people picked up hitchhikers to help fellow citizens get around. A walk down Queen St. W. last night shows little evidence of that civic spirit, with discarded coffee cups and food wrappers already, three days in, lining the sidewalks. At some point will Toronto residents realize that they are, themselves, the problem? I won’t hold my breath.

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I’m probably showing my age, but I’m relieved that the grownups have intervened and cancelled a planned rave in the old Don Jail. The new owner’s site had the wrong tone, and something like this was probably inevitable. More here and here.

The old jail could be used as a performance art venue, but in all decency it has to be in a context that works with themes around suffering and despair, both experienced by the inmates and by their victims, and by the people who worked in the building before it was a Doors Open curiosity.

The place has a dark history – not playfully Gothic dark, but really seriously dark, and I don’t think that’s registered with the people offering ‘ghost tours’. More below the fold.

Continue Reading »

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Whose nephew is little Gabriel Blake, the four-year-old who is the focus of an inexplicable top-of-page article in the Saturday Globe? There must be some reason so many words are dedicated to the story of a little boy who went missing for a total of — count ‘em — two hours. Not to ruin the suspense, but the subhead shares the exciting outcome of the 120-minute ordeal: “Child Home Safely.”

I’ve no doubt these were two worrying hours for this child’s parents. But let’s take a look at what actually happened:

- the boy boarded a bus that came by his house to take his older brother to school.
- the four-year-old said his parents weren’t home.
- the driver called the house and got no answer. (The boy’s parents were asleep.)
- the driver took the younger son to his brother’s school, which called his parents.

So, with some minor variances, the system worked. Rather than leave the small boy at an apparently empty, parent-free house where the phone rang without being answered, the driver, who was new to the route, took the kid directly to his brother’s school. The reward? The driver has been suspended for a violation of protocol.

I have some questions: if the bus stopped at the house every morning, why didn’t it occur to the parents that their little boy might have got on it? Where was their other son — the one who takes the bus every day — that morning? Why does every article about a missing (or temporarily AWOL child) think it’s important we know he/she is “blond haired, blue eyed”? (And — now that I think about it– why can’t I recall ever reading a story like this about a brown-haired, brown-eyed tot?) Why the constant amazement at children having misadventures that result in no harm?

And the most important question of all: what the fuck is this doing in a newspaper?

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I love this. After 48 hours of constant Tamil protests, in this TPS release we still have carefully neutral language, gentle concern for safety, “the co-operation of most of the protestors”, and a metaphorical shrugging of shoulders about the inevitable traffic tie-ups.

I didn’t check this morning to see if anyone was petting the horses, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it.

News Release
Toronto Police Service

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 – 9:25 AM

Public Information
416-808-7100

The Toronto Police Service has taken further steps to ensure the safety of the public and those participating in the Tamil community vigil along University Avenue.

See previous release.

On Tuesday, April 28, 2009, at approximately 7 a.m., with the co-operation of most of the protestors, police moved the barricades, that were in place, to the east side of University Avenue. This was done to ensure a safe environment for the officers, protestors and the public.

The Toronto Police Service is committed to working with those who wish to express their views in a peaceful and safe manner. Protestors are urged to use the east side of University Avenue.

University Avenue will remain closed from Dundas Street West to Queen Street West until further notice.

Police suggest that the public consider alternate routes, in the affected area, until further notice.

Traffic congestion on the roadways and within the transit system is to be expected.

Constable Wendy Drummond, Public Information

There are no files attached to this release.

http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/newsreleases/release.php?id=16286

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A question I’m pulling out of a comment on another post, from Return of the Bees:

–

Here’s the Highway Traffic Act:

Pedestrian right of way

(28) Every pedestrian who lawfully enters a roadway in order to cross may continue the crossing as quickly as reasonably possible despite a change in the indication he or she is facing and, for purposes of the crossing, has the right of way over vehicles. R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 144 (28).

So, the woman proceeding south across Front St. at the Blue Jays Way crossing from the northwest corner to the southwest corner, on a striped pedestrian crosswalk, at ca 9:45 p.m. this week, who proceeded when the light turned green and was run over by the rear wheel of a truck making a right turn presumably into the left lane because of a wide turning base, had the right of way.

Here’s my question RE sidetracking, as with the financial planner (and so much else in life): She was talking on a cell phone, and/but why’s that relevant? All the articles written afterwards about cell phones and iPods are beside the point, which is to say, the cell phone handicapped her, and/but this put her on the same basis as the rest of us handicapped folk–she’d have been squashed just as flat if she was in a wheelchair, deaf, using a white cane, pushing a walker, or… old. Or, even possessed of a simple desire to be “dead right”.

So… Why the fixation on the irrelevant cell phone? Isn’t that getting royally sidetracked?

Why’s everyone evidently reluctant to confirm if the truck driver was proceeding into the intersection against the law?

–

My take on it: I’d normally agree that the cellphone is legally irrelevant, but in this case it does sound like it was the factor that led to her death. From the CBC:

Because she was on her cellphone at the time, police said, she didn’t notice the truck, and walked right into the side of it. She fell to the street and was run over by the truck’s rear wheels, police said.

So if the truck was already in the intersection and turning, the driver cannot in this case be held responsible for the behaviour of a pedestrian who wasn’t in the intersection at the time he began his turn.

As a cyclist I certainly have learned to be very wary of anyone — motorist, pedestrian or cyclist — on a cellphone. They’re oblivious and do the oddest (frequently wildly illegal) things with no warning.

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