The lack of action on mandatory side guards for trucks is indicative of our cruel disregard, as a society, for the safety of cyclists.
On Monday, one week after Jenna Morrison’s death, a crowd of around 1,500 people rode their bikes through the city in her memory. The 38-year-old mother, who was expecting her second child, was struck by a truck on Nov. 7, while riding her bike near Dundas West and Sterling Road. She was thrown under the back wheels. Her son, Lucas, whose Spider-Man helmet was attached to the bike, is left without a mother, and the younger sibling he was expecting to be born this winter will never come. Morrison’s partner, Florian Schuck, is left to pick up the pieces.
Like thousands of others across the city, I feel a deep sadness over her death. And, like many others, I feel a current of rage.
I wrote an Eye Weekly editorial in 2004, calling for mandatory side guards on trucks across Canada. And then I wrote two more in 2006. And another one in 2007. NDP MP Olivia Chow has proposed legislation mandating them this week, as she did in 2006 and 2010. All these proposals came after cyclists were killed under the wheels of trucks. Their lives, and Jenna’s, may very well have been saved if such regulations existed.
Side guards, which can cost as little as $600, provide a barrier between the front and rear wheels of trucks, and prevent pedestrians, cyclists and small cars that are struck from the side from being thrown under the wheels. In the U.K. and Europe, where such equipment has been mandatory since the 1980s, a cyclist struck the same way Jenna Morrison was would be bounced to the side, likely bruised and cut rather than crushed and killed. An Ontario coroner’s report in 1998—13 years ago—suggested the federal government consider making them mandatory for trucks in Canada. A Transport Canada report last year noted the sharp decline in serious injuries and deaths in Europe and the U.K. after their introduction (61 per cent fewer deaths in the first 10 years in England), but didn’t recommend making them mandatory here. Apparently the evidence isn’t persuasive enough for regulators and the trucking industry.
This is indicative of our cruel disregard, as a society, for the safety of cyclists. My family car contains close to $1,000 in child safety seats, which are required by law, in addition to about $1,000 worth of mandatory front-seat airbags and a couple of hundred dollars worth of seat-belt equipment. Just over a decade ago, all playground equipment in half of Toronto’s schools was torn out and replaced at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per school because of safety concerns, even though there had never been a reported death or serious injury in a Toronto playground. Only two Toronto police officers have been shot to death in the past 28 years—13 across all of Ontario over the same period—yet virtually all officers wear bullet-proof vests that can cost $500 to $1,500 each.
Clearly, we feel that schoolchildren, police officers, and drivers and passengers of cars are worth spending a lot of money to protect. Meanwhile, the cost of side guards for trucks, possibly less than the cost of filling one with diesel fuel, is too high.
It’s not just truck equipment. Bike lanes can be had for the cost of paint. Yet the city of Toronto is spending $200,000 to remove them on Jarvis. A safe, city-wide bike network would amount to a footnote in our transportation infrastructure budget. It isn’t about money.
Our mayor once said he thinks cyclists who die in traffic have only themselves to blame, and he characterizes bike lanes as part of a “war on the car.” In the real history of that imaginary war, cyclists have inflicted approximately zero deaths on car drivers. Meanwhile, the memorial for Jenna Morrison concluded with the installation of a “ghost bike” marking the spot of her death, the 18th such bike unveiled since 2006.
At least 41 cyclists have lost their lives on Toronto’s streets since the 1998 coroner’s report that suggested side guards and a better bike network. They died because we just can’t be bothered to save them.
