It’s a ubiquitous sight in the downtown core: a driver enters a crowded intersection on a green light but fails to exit before it turns red. Stranded in the middle, the driver blocks cars in the other direction, and forces cyclists and pedestrians closer to moving vehicles.The Star recently filmed a single downtown intersection at rush hour to look at cyclist and driver behaviour as the city implements Vision Zero, a plan to reduce traffic deaths to zero by 2021. Something else stood out in the footage: how often we saw drivers “block the box.”In two hours last Thursday, we saw 92 red-light cycles at the intersection of Bay and Richmond Sts. Of those, 71 ended with a northbound vehicle either in the intersection or stopped on the pedestrian crosswalk.In the busier first hour of the Star’s video, from 4 to 5 p.m., 45 of 47 cycles ended with a blocked intersection. Vehicles the Star saw blocking the box in that hour included cars, transport trucks, several taxis and four TTC buses.Read more:Opinion | Edward Keenan: A simple solution to the maddening Toronto problem of cars blocking intersectionsWhen presented with the Star’s findings, experts and pedestrian and cycling advocates said the city is falling behind other jurisdictions that more aggressively target drivers who block intersections, impeding traffic flow and making streets harder to navigate for everyone. “It’s the easiest thing to enforce because the car is literally stuck there,” said Dylan Reid, co-founder of Walk Toronto and former co-chair of the Toronto Pedestrian Committee. Reid said it puzzles him why drivers force their cars into an intersection when they don’t already have space to clear it, adding the infraction can make it dangerous for people with strollers or in wheelchairs to cross. In the Star’s video, waves of pedestrians are forced to walk into the centre of the intersection. “I’ve never seen it being enforced,” ...
|
