In her third campaign item, Pamela Gough addresses pedestrian and cycling safety

Pamela Gough, Ward 3 Councillor Candidate at the City of Toronto

A previous post regarding traffic safety is entitled:

Pamela Gough will address pedestrian & cycling safety with traffic calming & reduced speed limits (Key Item 3 of 8)

The above-noted post includes a link to a video clip, in which Pamela Gough addresses the topic at hand; a transcript of her comments, from the clip, follows below.

Transcript of Item No. 3 in Pamela Gough’s election platform

So the next one is “Addressing pedestrian and cycling safety.”

So my background as a school trustee has been that I have listened, and listened, and listened to many school councils, and many parents involved, you know, with the schools.

And my experience has been that, for a lot of these parents, they are very, very frightened of letting their children walk or cycle to school, because they feel the roads are too unsafe.

And as a result, they’re driving their children to school, in droves. And that’s creating, again, excessive congestion around the schools, in the morning and in the afternoon pick-up time.

And it’s creating dangers for the children, as well.

Two of our TDSB children have been killed

Two of our TDSB children have been killed in the last year and a half, on the trip back from school.

And that’s completely beyond the pale, in terms of what we should be allowing in our city.

Our roads have to be much, much safer for pedestrians. The have to allow multiple modes of mobility. So that we can use public transit, we can walk, we can cycle – and, of course, in many parts of Etobicoke, driving is often the option of choice, and that needs to be a case of sharing the road.

So I’m very interested in changing road designs, particularly around school zones, to make the roads safer for children to walk and cycle to school.

People are using apps to drive far through neighbourhoods

And also neighbourhood drive-through situations, where people are using apps, to let them know where the traffic snarls are: Those apps are sending them through neighbourhoods, and they’re going through those neighbourhoods at high speed. Some of those neighbourhoods have no sidewalks.

Something has to be done about that.

We have to address road designs, so that the road itself tells the drivers to drive at a lower and safer speed.