Toronto Mayor John Tory couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that the city’s “Vision Zero” plan has been a flop so far, so let us say it for him:

Vision Zero, as it’s been implemented over the past two and half years, has had zero impact on reducing the number of pedestrian deaths on our streets.

This plan has been a botch, a bungle, a non-success. In short, it’s been a failure, judging by the most basic metric — how many people walking or cycling in the city have been killed by cars.

According to statistics compiled by the Star, 42 pedestrians and five cyclists were killed on Toronto streets last year. That total is higher than that recorded since 2007 in a police database. The trend, in other words, has been going in exactly the wrong direction.

But let’s be generous and not spend too much time peering into the rear-view mirror (a dangerous way to drive, in any case).

Instead, we applaud the mayor for recommitting his administration to the goal of moving toward zero deaths on the streets with what he calls “Vision Zero 2.0.”

Tory laid out the revised plan last week, and it looks to be a more ambitious and potentially more effective version of what city council approved back in July 2016.

The new plan has the great advantage of focusing on the areas where pedestrian fatalities have been concentrated: on suburban streets, notably Scarborough, where wide arterial roads and speeding cars pose the greatest danger to life and limb.

The problem, as the mayor laid out in a speech to the Empire Club, is that these streets weren’t built for pedestrian safety or even pedestrian convenience. They were built to move the most cars as quickly as possible, and as such they pose big problems for anyone trying to do something as simple as cross the road.

Drivers have been clocked at terrifying speeds on some of these streets — as high as 202 km/h on one road with an official speed limit of just 40 km/h.

To make matters worse, official protected crossings are wide apart — an average of 870 metres in Scarborough, where 40 per cent of all pedestrian deaths were recorded last year.

That means a person on foot would have to walk an extra six minutes just to cross the street safely, a very big ask at any time and especially in the middle of a bitingly cold Toronto winter. Seniors and anyone with difficulty walking face the biggest dangers.

The bottom line is that it shouldn’t be up to people to adapt to streets. The streets should be designed to accommodate people, and keeping them safe should be the highest priority.

That will mean lower speed limits and a lot more enforcement of the existing limits on key arterial roads, something Tory has been reluctant to endorse in the past.

Now he has come around to acknowledging the need for speed reductions on selected roads, as well as more mid-block crossings, more red-light cameras to catch the worst offenders, and photo radar in school and safety zones.

We welcome this plan. City council should support it and the province should move quickly on making any changes in regulations needed to deploy photo radar.

At the same time, the mayor has now raised expectations for progress on pedestrian safety much higher.

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The baby steps taken so far under Vision Zero clearly haven’t been enough, by Tory’s own admission. We need to see action along the lines of what he spelled out last week, leading within a reasonable period of time to the point of this whole exercise: fewer fatalities and injuries on Toronto streets.

We can’t afford another year of foot-dragging on an issue that is literally a matter of life and death.

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