A sign reminding drivers to slow down while in the vicinity of a Davisville middle school has been removed amid concerns that it was actually having an adverse effect on road safety.
Last week, the city installed flexible in-road traffic calming signs in a dozen school zones across the city. The initiative was a widely promoted part of the city’s $86-million Vision Zero Road Safety Plan and Mayor John Tory even helped install one of the signs himself live on CP24.
Questions are now being asked about the effectiveness of at least one of the signs, however.
Tory’s spokesperson Don Peat has confirmed to CP24 that crews removed the sign on Davisville Avenue near Mount Pleasant Avenue amid concerns about public safety. He said that there were concerns that buses, in some cases, were veering into the opposite lane of traffic to safely get around the sign.
Speaking with CP24 on Friday, General Manager of Transportation Services Barbara Grey said that the problem mostly stemmed from the way drivers were interacting with the sign, something she said that staff would not have been aware of prior to it being installed.
“The sign went in a location where we had a tight, tight space but certainly there was enough room. What happens when you put something like that new into the street is you have to go out and take a look and make sure that it is working properly, though. The way that people interact with it is almost just as important so we decided to come and take it out because people were not acting around it in the way we anticipated.”
Gray said that the in-road traffic calming signs have not previously been used in Toronto, though she said that city staff looked to Ottawa and Markham as models for their use.
She said that in the wake of the removal of one of the signs, staff have already reached out to Davisville Middle School officials to discuss other traffic-calming measures that could be taken, including different signage that would not be placed in the roadway.
“Speeding was indicated as a problem at that school so we will be going back with a number of different Vision Zero tools,” she said.
Speaking with reporters earlier this week, Tory said that the signs were installed with the thought that they would grab drivers’ attention and cause them to be more cautious.
He said that removal of the sign is not an indictment on the program, which is part of a one-year pilot project, but is simply an example of staff responding to community concerns.
“When you have a pilot project, as we've had with other pilot projects, changes happen during the course of that project but it doesn’t mean that these signs won't fulfill their purpose,” he said. “We will have them out there and we will judge the overall impact of those signs once we've had some time to see how they work and that will include, I'm sure, changing locations from time to time or doing things like that to take account of the reality of how traffic works."
