Ontario child pedestrians living in lower-income neighbourhoods are at a higher risk of being injured in pedestrian-motor vehicle accidents than kids from higher-income areas, according to a new study from the Hospital for Sick Children, York University and non-profit research institute ICES.

According to a press release from ICES, the research team used data provided by the institute to study trends of pediatric visits to emergency departments across the province due to pedestrian-vehicles collisions from 2008 to 2015.

The data was then divided into five equal groups ranging from the lowest-income areas to the highest-income areas.

The study found that although the total number of visits for pedestrian injuries resulting from collisions decreased by 18 per cent over the seven-year period, the rates of visits from low-income neighbourhoods increased by 14 per cent. More generally, children from the wealthiest areas had a 48 per cent lower rate of visits than children in poorer neighbourhoods.

According to Dr. Alison Macpherson, a professor at York University’s School of Kinesiology and Health Sciences and the study’s senior author, one of the contributing factors to the higher risk is that children from lower-income areas have access to limited means of transportation.

“Children who are the most disadvantaged ... often live in families that don’t have a car,” she told the Star. “They don’t have a choice about how they get to school, how they get to go grocery shopping, etc. They have to take care of transit and they have to walk.”

The study also found that 73 per cent of collisions occurred in cities and 20 per cent in the suburbs, and that 54 per cent of children who visited the emergency department due to these types of collisions were male.

Dr. Linda Rothman, a senior research associate in Child Health Evaluative Sciences at the Hospital for Sick Children and the study’s lead author, said “child pedestrian injury is a public health and health equity issue.”

“Although progress has been made in reducing preventable pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions, more work remains to be done,” Rothman said in a press release. “Our streets should be safe for all children to walk to school, to the playground or to the park.”

The team also found, in earlier research, that there were differences in road safety features among various neighbourhoods that could explain the disparities. For example, high-income areas had a higher number of low-speed roadways and traffic calming measures.

In that vein, the researchers said that there was a potential to reduce the number of child pedestrian-motor vehicle collision rates in lower income areas by implementing similar measures — including new elements like speed humps and road narrowings.

Dylan Reid, co-founder of grassroots advocacy group Walk Toronto, said that he “wasn’t surprised” about the results of the study.

“We know — and this is what the study says — that low-income children tend to live in areas that are more dangerous,” Reid said. “But there’s not as much pedestrian safety infrastructure where the roads are bigger and faster.”

Reid said it was also very important for the city and the province to make a “concerted effort” to improve safety on the streets, especially since “those areas sometimes don’t have the resources to advocate for themselves like high-income areas do.”

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The study acknowledged that the data used did not include children who died at the scene of the collision, which likely under-represents deaths in the analysis.

It also assigned income status based on the children’s residence and not the site of the collision and therefore the link with the environment can’t be “definitively addressed,” the study said.