Older citizens bore the brunt of a record-breaking 12 months for pedestrian deaths in Toronto last year.

Statistics released to the Star by the Toronto police this week confirmed that last year was the deadliest for the city’s pedestrians in more than a decade, with 43 people killed by drivers. That’s the highest death toll since at least 2005, the oldest year on record in data recently released by the city.

The figures show that last year also saw the highest number of older people killed on the streets in a decade. Thirty-seven of the victims, or 86 per cent, were over 55, which is the age the city’s road safety plan uses to define “older adults.” The demographic makes up about a quarter of the population.

Although older people regularly account for a disproportionate number of traffic injuries, the percentage of deaths for those older than 55 was the highest in a single year since at least 2005. People aged 65 and older made up 67 per cent of victims last year.

The numbers “are of great concern to us,” said Adina Lebo, chair of the downtown chapter of CARP, a seniors’ advocacy group. She said with the city’s older population set to double to 1.2 million in the next 25 years, the city “really has to look into what we’re going to do in Toronto to make life safer for an aging population.”

Public works chair Councillor Jaye Robinson (Ward 25, Don Valley West) called the numbers “alarming.”

Robinson, who is the mayor’s lead for the road safety plan, said the city is taking action to specifically protect older pedestrians by creating “senior safety zones” that will feature measures like additional midblock crossings, lower speed limits, better lighting and signage, and longer pedestrian crossing times at signalized intersections.

The zones combine measures already announced in the road safety plan, and would be created in areas frequented by older citizens such as community centres, Robinson said.

The councillor said the city will release more information in the coming weeks about how many of the zones will be implemented, and will start setting them up this month.

“We want to address it in a very aggressive manner,” she said.

Maureen Coyle, a gerontologist and member of Walk Toronto’s steering committee, agreed that more needs to be done to protect seniors. But she criticized the city’s strategy of enacting seniors safety zones only in specific areas.

“Seniors are everywhere,” Coyle said. “How about we just have a broad-based, broadly enacted, universal plan to make our roads safer?”

Council approved the road safety plan in July. It will see the city spend $80.3 million over five years on protective measures focused on older adults, children, pedestrians, cyclists, and deterring aggressive and distracted driving. The investment has been characterized by safety advocates as too modest to significantly reduce road deaths.

In an email Keerthana Kamalavasan, a spokesperson for Mayor John Tory, said the road safety plan “presents a smart, targeted, collaborative approach to reducing injuries and fatalities on our streets.”

She said that since council approved the plan, the city has created 14 “pedestrian safety corridors,” installed 400 new speed signs, shortened pedestrian crossing distances at 14 locations, increased crossing times at 37 intersections, and moved forward with plans for red light cameras at 79 locations.

The mayor believes the number of pedestrians and cyclists injured last year “is both alarming and unacceptable,” Kamalavasan said, noting that Tory held an emergency meeting with the police and transportation department last month to discuss the problem. “We must do more to prevent these deaths and protect our residents across the city.”

The pedestrian death count provided by the police was slightly lower than figures tallied by the Star’s sister publication, Metro News, and previously cited in the Star.

A spokesperson for the police said the force omitted at least one incident that was later deemed a homicide, and that the police figures don’t include deaths on provincially-owned highways within Toronto’s borders.

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Although by some measures traffic deaths are getting worse, at least one statistic is moving in the right direction. Only one cyclist died on Toronto’s roads last year, the fewest since 2009. In the four years prior to 2016, cyclist fatalities fluctuated between three and four annually.

Jared Kolb, executive director of Cycle Toronto, said that while one death is still one too many, he believes the expansion of the city’s bike lane network is beginning to bear fruit.

“I don’t think we can say at this point that cycling across the city is safer than ever. But what we can say is more people are riding, and that’s a direct result of more infrastructure on our city streets,” he said, asserting that more people using bike lanes has created a “safety-in-numbers effect.”

According to the police, in total there were 1,958 pedestrian collisions and 1,070 cyclist collisions reported last year.