Collision reporting to be made easier in downtown Toronto with new reporting centre, online app

TORONTO -

After years of asking cyclists and pedestrians involved in collisions to report those crashes far from downtown, where most crashes occur, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) is opening up a new collision reporting centre in Liberty Village come January.

The private contractor who runs the centres is also exploring a smartphone app to make reporting minor collisions even more convenient, the agency tells CTV News Toronto.

The idea is to get the city and the police more data on crashes and to remove a major barrier to cyclists getting a collision report — something that can be a ticket to getting resources to help them recover from their injuries.

“We’re trying to make it easier to report and we want to encourage reporting,” Supt. Scott Baptist, the district commander of traffic operations for the Toronto Police, said.

“We’re hoping that having this kiosk available will encourage reporting and make sure there’s a better system for everyone involved,” he said.

Collisions reported vs. reporting centres in the Toronto area

The Liberty Village collision reporting centre will open on Jan. 1 at the Toronto Police’s traffic services building on Hanna Avenue. It was meant to open last year but the pandemic closed police stations to the public for months, Baptiste said.

“We were ready to rock last fall. But the second and third waves of COVID-19 had police stations closed to public access. We couldn’t initiate this and it’s been delayed,” he said.

About 700 crashes involving cyclists are reported to Toronto Police each year. A police officer attends between 75 per cent and 86 per cent of them, according to a report to the Toronto Police Services Board. The remainder, which involve less property damage or serious injuries, are sent to collision reporting centres to assess the damage.

But there are plenty of crashes that aren’t reported at all, including a few that have happened to cyclist Sean Killackey. He described getting hit by a car while bicycling along University Avenue a few years ago and lying on his back on the sidewalk. He wasn’t taken to the hospital.

He said he has also been ‘doored’ — when a car opens a door into a moving bicycle.

“I had major scrapes on my body and, that time, we did call the non-emergency police line and they told us to go to the collision reporting centre in North York,” he said.

In both crashes, he was about 15 kilometres away from a collision reporting centre, about an hour and 45 minutes away by bike and an hour and 20 minutes away by public transit.

“It would be on very scary roads. I wasn’t going to go there. It didn’t seem like there was any point in going,” he said. “So that didn’t get reported.”

He said if there had been a collision reporting centre in Liberty Village — about 20 minutes away on a bicycle from the site of those crashes — he would have reported the crash.

Courtesy of CTV News Toronto's Jon Woodward.

There’s no cost to the taxpayer for the new service, said Steve Sanderson, the president of Accident Support Services International. His service, he said, is paid for by arrangements with insurance companies.

“We wanted to make it convenient for the public,” he said. “We were concerned about the distance they had to go to report minor collisions.”

Sanderson said the company is also testing a smartphone app so that some reports can be done over the internet. But he cautioned that approach won’t work for many crashes, because there needs to be an independent accounting of the damage to avoid fraud. In other cases, an online form could speed up reporting, he said.

“If you were in the comfort of your own home and sit down and start the process, we’d be expecting to see you and we’ll be prepared with that form already pre-filled, so you won’t be spending a lot of time with us,” he said.

Lawyer and bicycling advocate David Shellnutt said he’s happy that the collision reporting centre is could soon be online because it could help cyclists get the report they need to access benefits.

But he says much more needs to be done to deter crashes from happening in the first place.

“This isn’t a solution to road safety in Toronto. The city needs to get behind consistent and widespread infrastructure and we need an attitude shift in society to see driving as a privilege and not a right,” he said.