Residents living in the city’s Queensway neighbourhood hope a temporary traffic light installed after video surfaced of a woman being struck by a vehicle will “will save lives.”
Over the weekend, a city contractor outfitted two Queensway pedestrian crosswalks with interim traffic lights. According to residents, it was something that was long overdue.
“This is a wonderful change,” said Tanya Lewis, who lives in the area. “I’ve seen multiple times of cars screeching, coming through, you have to be so careful at this previous crosswalk. It was just, it’s a real danger.”
The addition of the traffic lights comes a little over a week after a video of a pedestrian being struck by a vehicle near The Queensway and Milton Avenue surfaced online.
In the video, a woman is seen pushing the button at the crosswalk, making eye contact with approaching drivers and pointing to indicate she was crossing the road. As she walks, a minivan plows through the intersection and hits the pedestrian.
The pedestrian is thrown several metres and sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The 56-year-old driver was subsequently charged with careless driving causing bodily harm, police said.
Toronto Mayor John Tory called the video ‘horrifying’ and vowed to look into improving safety of the intersection.
“There are going to be not one but two signals installed on that stretch and if they have to put in temporary signals to start to bring some order to a place where clearly there are things that are going very wrong, then that is what they will do,” Tory said.
According to police, there have been six property damage collisions at the intersection since January 2018.
“I used to cross, run just across the street here all the time and hope cars would actually stop,” said a resident named Monica. “Having a light here is actually safer.”
“It’s been scary,” another resident said. “I saw the video of the woman being hit and it could have been us. My son and I were there just a few days earlier.”
The City of Toronto said there was already a plan in place to install a traffic light at that intersection, but the video helped speed up the process.
“The video was starting,” said city spokesperson Eric Holmes. “The video was startling,” said city spokesperson Eric Holmes. “You image if it was a friend or a family member, you never want to see anybody, even a stranger, be injured like that.”
According to Holmes, city council directed staff to convert or upgrade the pedestrian crossover at the intersection in 2017.
The traffic lights installed are temporary, but Holmes says that preliminary plans for permanent traffic lights in the area are already complete.
