City garbage trucks have been in more than 500 collisions since 2009, the majority of which were their drivers’ fault, but the city does not know the equivalent figure for the private garbage trucks collecting trash in Toronto.

The city’s solid waste division provided the Star with crash figures for its own fleet Monday, showing that the pungent blue-and-yellow trucks have been in 524 collisions in the past five years, and that almost two-thirds of those were the fault of the city driver.

When asked to disclose accident stats for GFL Environmental Inc., the private contractor that has been picking up garbage between Yonge St. and the Humber River since 2012, the city declined, initially saying it doesn’t have those numbers.

Vincent Sferrazza, acting general manager for Solid Waste Management Services, then revised that statement, adding that contractors are required to provide “notice of serious collisions as specified within the terms of our contract.”

Sferrazza declined on Monday to explain what constitutes a “serious” collision, or to provide the number of serious collisions that GFL has reported.

GFL, the contractor that took over waste removal in western Toronto under a seven-year, $186.4-million contract with the city, did not respond to multiple requests for its collision figures or for comment. The company’s Ontario safety record, available to the public for a $5 fee, shows that GFL’s trucks have been in 274 collisions and 65 convictions province-wide since June 2012.

The record does not specify where the collisions occurred. The company’s website lists “solid waste haulage” operations in eight Ontario locations, including Toronto.

In April, the province downgraded GFL’s safety rating from “satisfactory” to “conditional,” which appears to have cost the company its chance to bid again on the lucrative Etobicoke waste removal contract it had held since December 2011. Miller Waste Systems will take over those routes a year from now.

GFL’s existing contract with Toronto is not threatened by the new safety designation, since the company is only required to make “every effort” to maintain a satisfactory rating, which the city says it is doing.

Councillor Gord Perks, a persistent critic of outsourcing waste removal, believes the provincial statistics are good enough.

“We rely on the province’s regulatory body to keep the worst offenders off the road,” he said. “We build into our contracts tools that allow us to use the provincial rating system to weed out unsafe operators, which I think is adequate.”

GFL’s safety score — 78.3 per cent as of Monday, based on a knotty formula taking into account collisions, convictions and inspection results — is worse than more than 99 percent of commercial vehicle operators in Ontario, the Star reported in May. City officials have argued that the rating is skewed by a rocky first three months when new GFL drivers were getting used to their routes.

Data on the city-run garbage truck fleet, which includes recycling and green bin removal and covers the years 2009 to 2013, shows that one driver has been in 10 collisions during that period.

Mark Ferguson, president of CUPE Local 416, the city’s outside-worker union, said the figure was “concerning” but that he needed “more time to look into the specifics of the case.”

The overwhelming majority of drivers — 275 — had been in three or fewer crashes.

City garbage truck drivers were found to be at fault in nearly two-thirds of their crashes, more than double the rate for TTC operators.

Ferguson again said he needed more time to review the data before commenting.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, however, called the collision figures and the high rate of fault among drivers “alarming.” “The city needs to examine why, on the face of it, our garbage truck drivers have such a poor record of accidents that could have been avoided,” he said.

The city’s garbage truck fleet hovered between 300 and 350 vehicles until 2013, when it fell to 221 after GFL took up collection west of Yonge St.

The city-run trucks also averaged slightly under 3 million kilometers per year. In a written statement, Sferrazza said distance driven was generally a poor measure of how accident-prone garbage trucks are, because they cover so little distance relative to other kinds of vehicles.