I have a vivid vision of my own death in Toronto.

It will not come by earthquake or flood or even falling condo glass, but rather it will happen on a sunny day when I’m walking my dog down Jarvis St., as we do every day. He’ll be sniffing a wrought iron fence, I’ll be asking him to get a move on, and a fast moving car will mount the curb and demolish both of us while standing on our sidewalk. It’s happened here before, blessedly when no pedestrians were around, but a parking machine was sheared off its foundation.

Walking and biking in Toronto feels incredibly precarious of late. The intensity of car traffic and the aggression of frustrated drivers have become a defining part of everyday life here, but our civic officials can barely bring themselves to address that reality. If you follow the Toronto Police Services Operations @TPSOperations Twitter account, the accelerated carnage on our streets is evident everyday. Just last Monday alone eight pedestrians were struck by cars, one in Rexdale fatally, and four cyclists were hit.

This isn’t just a downtown problem, as the TPS feed notes collisions across the city every day. Phil Mendonca-Vieira, a software engineer, has created the site deathbytraffic.ca, tallying the dead pedestrians and cyclists himself. As of Tuesday, Toronto was at 22 dead since January, on track for a record year.

Some people have started calling this the Summer of the Car, evoking Toronto’s Summer of the Gun in 2005, when 52 people were killed, events that mobilized political action. The 2003 SARS outbreak claimed 44 lives in the Toronto area, and the city was in a rightful state of panic. But this is death by car, a most central thing to our North American identity, so we don’t talk about it as if it were a public health crisis. Perhaps we should.

In June, Mayor John Tory announced a road safety program based on Sweden’s Vision Zero model for reaching no fatalities, but timidly set a goal of just a 20 per cent reduction over 10 years. After being criticized, Tory changed the target later that day to zero fatalities in five years — but with no additional funding. When numbers are swapped around so easily to appease critics, cynicism sets in.

To his credit, the mayor released a radio public service announcement a few days later urging drivers to drive cautiously. However, like the mayor himself, the ad was nice and polite and, well, timid. Bold action is needed because Toronto drivers are incredibly bad. The Leafs may be bad at hockey, but Toronto is worse at driving.

In its delusional imagination, Toronto still thinks of itself as a wide-open Midwestern city, where you can drive everywhere easily, park out front and cruise to the next stop. That’s not the city that exists today, a place thick with human traffic of all kinds. Skilful and attentive driving wasn’t needed in the past, but its absence now is deadly.

As a regular motorist I see this obliviousness play out in one quintessentially entitled Toronto act: Switching on a turn signal only after the light turns green, giving no early warning to those behind, is emblematic of the skill level here.

Nobody would ever accuse Tory of being anti-car — recall he’s spending nearly a billion dollars rebuilding the Gardiner East — so if he undertook real leadership on this issue it would be like Nixon going to China, leading a campaign to get drivers to instinctively expect and respect pedestrians and cyclists on the street. Everyone is a pedestrian at some point in the day, even drivers, and unless cars end up taking all of them out, they’ll continue to be there.

Freedom to walk the streets in peace is taken away from Torontonians all the time, through sexual harassment, by police carding or by fear of being maimed or killed by cars. For now though, until the mayor and others take a loud, visible and unrelenting stand, walking and riding with the fear of death is the Toronto reality we live in.