TTC vehicles were involved in 4,001 collisions last year, according to the transit agency, the equivalent of almost 11 every day.

The figures, which were provided by the TTC, include both minor and major incidents in which the agency’s buses, streetcars, and Wheel-Trans vehicles were involved, and represent a slight increase compared to the previous year, when there were 3,788 crashes.

Agency spokesperson Stuart Green said the statistics include everything from inconsequential collisions like a bus mirror contacting a garage wall, to serious crashes that injure other road users.

“Our vehicles travel around 250 million kilometres a year in total and every single ding, no matter how minor, is captured in these numbers,” he said in an email.

Green stressed that any collision “is of concern to the TTC,” but he noted that the agency deploys close to 2,000 passenger-carrying vehicles on the city’s streets every day. That makes crashes likely, if not inevitable.

“The safety of our customers, operators and all those with whom we share the streets of Toronto is paramount to the TTC,” Green said.

“Through extensive training and retraining programs ... we make sure our operators are as well-prepared as possible to carry out their duties under the most challenging situations.”

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Buses, which make up the vast majority of the TTC’s fleet of surface vehicles, accounted for 3,187 collisions last year, while streetcars were involved in 549, and Wheel-Trans vehicles in 265.

The TTC determined 1,135 of the 4,001 collisions, or more than one quarter, were “preventable,” a term the agency uses when it believes the transit employee operating the vehicle was at fault. That was 109 more preventable collisions than the year before.

However, Kevin Morton, the secretary-treasurer of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113, the largest TTC workers union, dismissed the agency’s designation of preventable crashes as “subjective, arbitrary, and skewed.”

That’s because the TTC sometimes determines through its own investigation that a collision was preventable, even if the employee behind the wheel is never charged with a Highway Traffic Act offence.

“TTC drivers are good and qualified,” Morton said. “These statistics are not indicative of our drivers.”

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In addition to the raw number of crashes rising slightly last year, the rate of crashes — measured by how many collisions there were per 100,000 miles travelled — also increased compared to 2016.

The collision rates for buses and streetcars rose slightly, while only the rate for Wheel-Trans vehicles fell. Streetcars had the highest rate and the largest increase, with the vehicles involved in 7.61 crashes per 100,000 miles of service in 2017, up from 6.3 in 2016.

Green said that despite the increase, collisions rates are still “consistently low,” particularly for crashes in which transit employees were deemed at fault. There were just 1.06 preventable bus crashes per 100,000 miles, and 1.37 preventable streetcar collisions.

The TTC’s safety record, as reported to through Ontario’s commercial vehicle operators program, is “among the best in the province,” Green said.

Most of the crashes last year didn’t cause injuries. But 180 of the incidents resulted in non-fatal injuries, and four were deadly.

The fatal collisions included a 50-year-old driver who was killed when she rear-ended a bus that had stopped to pick up passengers on Sheppard Ave. E. in Scarborough, and a 65-year-old man hit by a streetcar as he crossed Spadina Ave. downtown.

A 39-year-old cyclist named David Delos Santos was also killed when he was hit by a truck that had collided with a streetcar on King St. W. in Parkdale.

The TTC determined 45 of the 180 crashes that caused non-fatal injuries were preventable.

The agency deemed just one fatal collision last year preventable. In that instance, a 71-year-old woman was struck by a bus from which she had just disembarked, near Eglinton Ave. E. and Midland Ave. The TTC driver was charged with careless driving and starting unsafely from a stopped position.

The TTC launched a program to reduce fatal collisions in 2015, after its vehicles were involved in a string of deadly crashes. Under the Safe Service Action Plan, the agency increased the amount of time new drivers have to spend behind the wheel before they start regular duty, started an internal awareness campaign about safe driving, and adopted a software tool to identify when operators’ records might indicate they were at risk for a crash.

The agency credited the plan for successfully eliminating pedestrian fatalities involving TTC buses and streetcars in 2016.