City
Morning Brew: More Pedestrian Fatalities, Toronto Housing Not Affordable, ChemTRAC Bylaw Underway, Con Man Preying on the Elderly, Changes to EMS "Staging" Policy
Photo: "Warning" by mandrs, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
The disturbing trend continues. The GTA has seen 14 pedestrian deaths due to accidents involving vehicles already in 2010. By comparison, Toronto has had just three homicides so far this year, making us more than four times more likely to get run over by a car than have our lives ended by a murderer.
In not-so-breaking news, Toronto housing has been declared not-so-affordable by a study The Demographia International. Creating demand for cheap housing on the fringe of the city, which encourages sprawl, is part of the problem.
ChemTRAC, the nation's first municipally mandated chemical tracking and reporting bylaw, is being introduced in Toronto and will be phased in over the next couple of years. The idea is to force companies to log and report on chemical use in hopes that reduction and more environmentally-friendly alternatives might be pursued. Seems easy enough for a beer producer to hop on board, but I'm not so sure that industries that work with harsh chemicals will be as enthusiastic about the new supply and waste logging requirements.
A disgusting creep of a man has been on a country-wide tour, preying upon the elderly along the way and conning them for their pension money after gaining their trust. It's rare that I would advocate for vigilante justice, but I would love to see a follow-up story that involves a Chuck Norris style nose break followed by a take down and duct tape tie up of the assailant while police are summoned.
Apparently when you're tried in courts in the US, you get a stiffer sentence than you do here in the Great White North. Two Toronto-based men got 25 year prison sentences for attempting to purchase missiles for the Tamil Tigers to fight in the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. Plotting to blow up government and public institutions here in Toronto landed some conspirators in the "Toronto 18" with lesser sentences.
Changes are coming to "staging" policies when Emergency Medical Services arrive on the scene of a 911 call. An inquiry into the death of Jim Hearst back in the summer has resulted in one particularly crucial change - before deciding to stage (i.e. wait nearby until any threat to their safety is deemed eliminated), responding paramedics must see the threat themselves.
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"The report says Vancouver was the most unaffordable market in the world last year when median housing sale values are compared to median household incomes."
Cheap housing on the fridge huh.. sounds like it's gonna be a lot warmer than inside the fridge....durrrrrrr
You want to make housing more affordable? Tighten up mortgage qualification standards.
Laws for affordable housing, but not criminal justice?
From the report" Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey employs the “Median Multiple” (median house price divided by gross annual median household income) to rate housing affordability" That seems to be a pretty simplistic measure of affordability. There is no affordable housing in the UK, NZ or Australia as far as they are concerned.
Detroit and South Bend are tied for number 1 in affordability. Lansing, Youngstown and Fort Wayne are tied for number 3. It appears to be more of a list of depressed places in which you'd not want to live.
I've also seen a lot of drivers looking to their left while making a right turn on red, and not bothering to look for pedestrians crossing legally from their right. Then there are the drivers who gun through a right turn as soon as the light turns green, despite the crowd of pedestrians starting to cross. I've seen more than a few close calls from that.
Toronto, for example has a lot of immigrants who flock here because of the large ethnic communities and because rent is relatively low and rental units abundant. The average rent in Toronto is about $1000 CAD. Compare that to other large cities such as New York: $2700 USD (or $4000 for Manhattan), Washington: $1500 USD, Boston: $1,700 USD, Vancouver: $1154 CAD, Montreal:$656
Combine that with the fact that Toronto has the largest amount of subsidized housing in the country and you can see why the median income ends up skewed to the low side.
People that have just came here with just the shirts on their backs don't bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars? Shocking I know.
If you want a more fair comparison (but still fails to take all variables into account), take a look at the median income of non-immigrant families ($92,000) and compare that to housing prices.
Toronto then ends up having a lower 'median multiple' than Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Montreal, Ottawa, Peterborough and even Saskatoon, most of which aren't likely going to be skewed as much due to immigration as Toronto is.
This isn't World War 2, it's quite costly to immigrate here nowadays unless you're a refugee
It's easy to see this by looking at NYC's gentrification of Harlem. http://socyberty.com/issues/gentrification-in-harlem/
People are people, and unfortunately a good portion of people seem to be functionally retarded, regardless of whether they're on foot or behind the wheel. And another part of the problem is the systemic lousy traffic engineering in this city.
I take it Mark's point was that a big part of the reason social housing goes to "shit" is that residents are further marginalized when they are moved further and further out to the margins of the city.
Not that the folks living in Rosedale mansions aren't awfully marginal characters themselves.
Now, I DO see many people crossing the street and not looking at all, as if that somehow makes the car dissapear, or distracted by Ipods and the like.
However, I think there is an overreliance in a feeling of security from lights and crosswalks, and that this is a huge problem. I think everyone should probably be looking around them, even if the light is green and the sign says walk, because otherwise you're putting your trust entirely in someone else paying attention and/or following those same rules.
Jaywalking is certainly dangerous in that you're putting yourself into traffic that doesn't expect you to be there/is moving, but in some sense, people are often more aware when jaywalking because of the very fact that they know they could be hit. Versus a crosswalk, where you feel safe.
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"making us more than four times more likely to get run over by a car than have our lives ended by a murderer."
That seems like it would be true even if pedestrian deaths weren't up 25% this year.
I'd hazard to guess that nearly 100% of the break-ins that currently happen in Rosedale are perpetrated by folks living just south in St Jamestown or the buildings on Sherbourne.
Social housing brings crime and there's no denying the correlation. The majority of people in social housing are obviously not criminals. But there are enough bad apples for me not to want social housing in my middle class neighbourhood or having my kids hang out with kids who are more likely to be bad influences.
Um, right... Like Regent Park, or St. James Town. Some margins your city has. No, the reason social housing goes to "shit" (or, more precisely, is usually "shit" to begin with) is that poor people live there. And there is strong a very strong correlation between poverty and crime, unchecked mental problems and many other undesirable things and behaviours. Obviously, not all poor people are like this, but a far greater percentage of them is than the average. Add to this the fact that the best slice of that population, smartest and hardest working social housing residents, the ones with a bit of self-respect left, are most likely to get the hell out soon, you end up with the absolute dregs of society concentrated in social housing projects. And yeah, as non-PC it might sound, most people wisely try to keep their distance from them.
http://tinyurl.com/qfwdl9
The rest are privately owned and rented at market rates.
a)yield the right of way to cars when not crossing at a controlled location, and
b) are governed by the common law requirement to "exercise due care".
By jaywalking you inherently assume some risk. The disturbing incidents are the ones where pedestrians get hit when they have the right of way. Jaywalkers who get run down is just natural selection.
When you're trying to get out of the city, and instead of taking 5 minutes once you catch that green wave, it takes you 20 minutes because you end up catching red light after a red light after a red light. No wonder drivers in the city are jumpy and give less and less shit about pedestrians... it's all about finding the most convenient/fastest route from point A to point B.
And nothing wrong with jaywalkers - they actually bother looking left and right a few times before they step onto the driving lanes. It's all those clueless and mindless intersection crossers with herd mentality turned on early in the morning (trying to get to work/school) or after work/school - if one person crosses on red light because they couldn't wait for it to turn green, everyone else follows, like it's ok now. And I see it enough times in downtown - cars with green light having to stop in front of the intersection and honk at people to wake them up and somehow have them realize they're jaywalking/crossing on their red.
If it was only legal to mow down jaywalkers like that, phew... I'd have a field day almost daily on my way to work & back.
I just want to refute what 90% of people imply or state: that jaywalking is illegal.
When jaywalking, the car always has the right of way. When crossing at a marked crossing, there are rules to determine if the PED or the car has the right of way.
What scares me is there will be politicians screaming about putting in speed banks, limiting speed limits etc.
I really don't feel sorry for anyone that dies from crossing the street, preoccupied with listening to an ipod or on their cell.
Just another idiot we don't need in this world.
Certainly it places blame (in part) on someone if they're hit when distracted by and iPod or cell phone, but christ, I think there are worse crimes in the world.
People don't deserve to die for not paying attention, anymore than they deserve to die because they're dumb (and who gets to decide that anyway, you?)
Well, your reply doesn't change my mind. I guess you are just as "responsible" as this group.
I guess you need your every move to be monitored and likes to be told what to do -- screw responsibility, right?
BTW, I don't decide who dies.
BUT, if I was a god -- I'll blow this planet up and start over.
But because I'm weak, I'll just let 5andman here know that his comment makes no sense, being both the opposite of what I said in my first comment and how I live... I wrote about how abiding the laws of when to cross and going by lights doesn't make you safe necessarily; that you still need to take responsibilty and be aware (hence why jaywalking is sometimes safer than "being told what to do").
As an aside, I find that misanthropy doesn't tend to work out for you in your daily life (instead of an equally subjective but manageable view of humans and the world).
To paraphrase a famous quote: "Nobody drives anymore, it's too congested"
There is no space in downtown for more cars. Building more roads is impossible.