Avenue Road Safety Coalition
October 4 – The Weekend Morning Show with Dave Trafford: “Make Avenue Road Safer Again”Interview with Albert Koehl, a Co-organizer, Avenue Road Safety Coalition Safety Awareness Day.
“A lot of local residents on foot simply avoid Avenue Road because they fear for their safety, even though this is where they live.”
@NEWSTALK1010 #AvenueSafeForAll
A community group is calling on the city to make a stretch of Avenue Road immediately safer for pedestrians.
The Avenue Road Safety Coalition, made up of residents’ associations and school parent councils, wants the city to set up a pilot project by the end of the year that would widen sidewalks on Avenue Road between St. Clair Avenue West and Bloor Street West.
According to the coalition, a 2.1-kilometre stretch of Avenue Road is a six-lane street that is hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. The coalition wants the speed limit lowered to 40 kilometres per hour.
The sidewalks on this stretch are “dangerously narrow,” the coalition says.
“Avenue Road, a six-lane, high-speed motorway running through the heart of Toronto, no longer fits with contemporary ideas about road safety or with the schools, parks, residential towers and seniors’ residences in its path.
The 2.1-kilometre stretch between Bloor Street West and St. Clair Avenue West was widened in 1959 by the old Metro government by chopping down trees and pilfering space from sidewalks….”
Residents will demonstrate Tuesday morning to urge slower speeds and wider sidewalks for the high-speed stretch of Avenue Road between St. Clair Ave. and Bloor Street. It sees some 30,000 vehicles a day and anyone who has walked the slivery sidewalks knows the meaning of fear. Five associations are allied as the Avenue Road Safety Coalition (ARSC). They are urging the City to establish an immediate pilot project to widen sidewalks and to lower the speed limit to 40 kilometres per hour between Bloor and St. Clair. Eighteen large banners will line Avenue Road calling for “Wider Sidewalks and Slower Speeds”.
SpacingTORONTO
The car wins on Avenue Road. It always does.
The pattern of valuing the convenience of drivers over everything else has been fixed since 1959, when the city chopped down trees and dramatically narrowed sidewalks to create six traffic lanes from St. Clair Avenue West to Bloor Street West so as to funnel cars quickly to the downtown.
Sixty years later, that’s the Avenue Road we still have on that 2.1-kilometre stretch between St. Clair and Bloor. It operates as a virtual expressway – a de facto Spadina Expressway. Pre-pandemic, it carried 30,000 vehicles a day – 85 per cent of them travelling above the posted speed limit – and it makes life deeply unpleasant for pedestrians and cyclists brave enough to try to use it.
TheGlobeAndMail.com
“An economic rebound in commercial retail amid the continuing COVID-19 pandemic may be right under our feet – in the sidewalks we walk on.
The key, however, depends on how wide they are.”
TheStar.com
“Its current highway nature is ironic, considering it was once an elegant, tree-lined road and how, it’s said, it got the name Avenue. Whatever trees manage to exist on it now are squeezed onto some of Toronto’s narrowest sidewalks where two people can barely pass each other without one being nudged into traffic.”
Avenue Road is known for high-end shopping, posh hotels, and multiple private schools.
It’s also known, some residents say, for having dangerously-narrow sidewalks alongside heavy traffic.
“It’s unsafe right now,” said Albert Koehl, a member of the Avenue Road Safety Coalition. “This street is no longer consistent with a modern downtown area.”
Koehl, a 25-year resident of midtown Toronto, is among those calling on the city to consider widening the sidewalks alongside the busy six-lane arterial road.
“People just want to live their lives on this street as we do in quiet residential areas, but it’s still treated as a thoroughfare, as a highway, and that’s inconsistent with what I think our Vision Zero road safety plan wants to do,” he added.
The coalition, which includes residents’ associations, school groups and other organizations, has reached out to local councillor Josh Matlow to take their mission to city hall, and Matlow said he’s started a process to have city staff review Avenue Road and consult with stakeholders.
CP24.com
“The swerving vehicle then lost control, mounted a sidewalk and hit the Hazelton Place Retirement Residence, striking a gas line in the process.”
