There are days where I am thoroughly convinced that when I die, it will be because I’m walking across a street in Guelph. There will be a fraction of a second where either I stop paying attention, or a driver stops paying attention, and I will be struck and killed.
I do not think this is irrational, and if you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last several months, I think everyone walking in Guelph feels the same.
Last week, someone else was struck and killed by a vehicle on a Guelph street while crossing the road, and while the City of Guelph’s own dashboard shows that pedestrian collisions were down by nearly 33 per cent in 2024, the number of fatalities increased by nearly five percent. Also, the number of cyclist collisions went up 45 per cent while the rate of fatal or severe injury is up slightly over 2023.
It's also worth noting that the 2024 data is not yet complete.
Last year, in the midst of concerns about safety downtown, specifically when it comes to the presence of unhoused people and people addicted to substances, I asked a philosophical question: How do you define safe? Is it being accosted by someone in crisis downtown, or is it getting struck by a car while you maybe have the right of way in one of the busiest crosswalks in town?
In shutting down the Consumption and Treatment Site, the provincial government determined that if such a facility exists within 200 metres of a school or daycare that’s unsafe. Applying those metrics to the city’s collision dashboard, would you be surprised to learn that there were four fatal collisions between 2019 and 2024 within 200 metres of a Guelph school. That number goes up nearly six times when you add “severe injuries” to that metric.
And I hate to say this, but this is also a class issue.
For decades, Guelph Transit has been seen as the option of last resort for people who can’t afford a private automobile, and the fact that city council’s recent moves to promote transit use is to give it away for free does not install confidence in the service. Even if there’s a case to be made that transit should be free, we know that the offer is being made because people don’t want to pay for it, even if they can.
Our modal shift goals are pathetic because our civic leaders know that access to Guelph and areas beyond is dependent on one’s access to an automobile. The regional transit options are pathetic, even on a weekday when there are more of them, which is to say nothing of the fact that any significant trip through Guelph itself is going to cost you between 30 minutes to an hour when it would take you 10 minutes in your car.
Essentially, car ownership just makes life in Guelph better. Why is that? I thought Guelph was a “green community”. I thought we were obsessed with walkability and active transportation.
Before Christmas, Mayor Cam Guthrie announced that he was looking to bring a motion to council to pause cycling infrastructure after talking to the ever-nebulous people about new projects on Scottsdale and Silvercreek, which was probably just coincidentally after the Ontario government’s drastic jurisdictional overreach on bike lanes received Royal Assent.
Supporting bike lanes and other cycling infrastructure is one of the few areas of progress policy that Guthrie has been consistent in supporting all these years, he’s talked about trips to European cities and wanting to make them a model here and working with the Guelph Coalition of Active Transportation to promote the idea. So why the pivot?
In the GuelphToday article on the subject, Guthrie said that the Cycling Master Plan was out of date, and perhaps the work that came from it should be stopped till an update is complete in 2025. Okay. So let me ask you this question: Was Guthrie really behind the improvement of cycling infrastructure or was he blowing that way because that was the way the wind was blowing?
I ask because the focus now is on the people yelling about all their troubles getting around town: Too many bike lanes, too much construction, too much traffic, not enough room, et al. This leans into the idea that the problem on our roads is not all the cars, but all the other people trying to use the road, or the efforts trying to keep those roads in good repair.
At this point, any obstacle on the road that prevents you from getting to point B from point A as quickly as possible is a personal slight whether that’s speed enforcement cameras, stop signs, or traffic lights. If only the city did road work at night, or coordinated traffic signals, or didn’t squander precious road space with bike lanes, you could just drive! But what does the data tell us? It tells us there’s never enough road for all the people that want to drive, and there never will be.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you are sitting in traffic then you are also traffic. It’s not something happening to you, but something you’re a part of. One of the hardest things in the world is looking honestly at yourself and admitting that you’re part of the problem, so I get it. And let’s be honest too about some pedestrians and cyclists because there are a few who can be pretty obstinate about their own road use as well.
And yet, if you’re a pedestrian and you’re doing everything absolutely right, you’re still going to lose in any battle of person versus car. Even if you’re not killed, you can be negatively impacted for the rest of that life, and that’s to say nothing of the psychological toll on survivors, or on the community, who in the back of their minds has the knowledge that getting around town can be incredibly unsafe if even just one thing goes wrong.
So the next time you’re behind the wheel think about that person crossing the street in front of you because they’re more scared of getting killed by you then you’re scared of getting to your destination late.
