Designed to Kill Pedestrians

Another Day, Another Tragedy: Richmond Hill Crash Exposes a Broken System

Today’s news from Richmond Hill is yet another grim reminder of what many of us already know far too well: our streets are unsafe for those most vulnerable. According to reports, two pedestrians were struck by vehicles shortly after 4 p.m. at the busy intersection of Leslie Street and Major Mackenzie Drive. One person was pronounced dead at the scene and another was taken to a trauma centre with life-threatening injuries. Additional victims were transported to local hospitals as emergency services and police investigated the collision.

There is sorrow in every such story, but there is also familiarity — a pattern of loss that continues in community after community. Just yesterday, a 3-year-old child, Violet MacDonald, was killed in Cambridge after a motor vehicle struck her and another pedestrian. She died from her injuries, leaving behind a grieving family and a community asking why we let these tragedies persist.

These heartbreaking incidents are far from isolated. They are part of a broader reality of traffic violence — a term that more accurately captures what happens when daily road design decisions, speed-prioritized engineering and systemic inattention to safety converge. Yet the typical institutional response remains the same: a police “investigation” to determine who to blame, a few days of media coverage, and then a collective exhale — as though we’ve finished dealing with the problem and can go home waiting for the next crisis.

Almost invariably, unless it involves impaired driving, drivers are rarely charged even when they kill pedestrians. Our legal and enforcement frameworks, shaped in large part by how we think about risk and blame, routinely treat these collisions as unfortunate accidents rather than preventable harms.

But the deeper problem isn’t just what happens after the crash — it’s what happens long before one. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, author Wes Marshall exposes how conventional traffic engineering has systematically sidelined safety in favour of moving vehicles quickly and efficiently. Marshall argues that the profession often relies on outdated, unexamined “science” and design practices that prioritize speed and capacity over human life, with safety routinely treated as an afterthought. The resulting streets — wide, high-speed, and engineered for vehicular throughput — inevitably put pedestrians and cyclists at risk.

Traffic signs and signals aren’t neutral tools. They are part of a built environment that, for decades, has been optimized for cars at the expense of people. Engineers, planners and policymakers have collectively covered their backs with regulatory checkboxes — speed limits here, crosswalks there — even when these measures directly conflict with common sense for those who aren’t in a car. The criteria used to justify design decisions rarely reflect the lived reality of a child waiting at a bus shelter, an elderly person navigating ice and snow, or a family crossing a multi-lane road.

This isn’t just poor planning. It is, as Marshall suggests, a dysfunctional and borderline criminal setup. Every time we elevate the convenience of shaving 20 seconds off a motorist’s commute over the safety of a person walking or biking, we send a message about whose lives we value. And every day we allow these decisions to go unchallenged, we tacitly agree to another preventable death.

If we are serious about change, we must start by changing how we design and govern our streets, and how we think about responsibility. We must demand real accountability — not just superficial investigations — and a transformation of our transportation system that places human life at the centre. Until then, another headline will inevitably be waiting tomorrow.