Overseas Adventures: Transportation culture in Toronto, Canada

As fans of the television series Parks and Recreation, my wife could not pass on an opportunity to tap into her inner Leslie Knope at a parks conference in Toronto. Since I had never been to Toronto before, aside from a few brief stints at Pearson airport while in transit, I felt like this was a good opportunity to explore another Canadian city. We had such a great time in Montreal back in 2014, I expected to have a similar experience this time around. So we hopped on a plane and and after a five hour flight, found ourselves sweltering in the heat of Toronto's summer heat wave.

News: Contractor for Uber involved in deadly accident

Image courtesy of Autoblog.com

Just before the new year, an accident in San Francisco left a 6 year-old girl dead and her mother critically wounded. The driver, Syed Muzzaraf, was behind the wheel of his Honda Pilot and turned into the family, who were utilizing the crosswalk at an intersection, without yielding to their right of way. Additional details are not clear at this time, but initial reports did not indicate the involvement of alcohol or any other controlled substance and the driver appeared to be entirely in control of the vehicle at the time.

While this would normally be buried in the local section of the newspaper and little more than a blip on the evening news, the fact that the driver was a contractor for the ride sharing service Uber has somehow raised it to the status of national news. Rather than focus on the dozens of other potential issues that this incident could help highlight, such as better pedestrian crosswalks or EMT response time or improved licensing requirements, the news media has instead decided to focus on whose insurance should foot the bill. They are trying to make the case to have Uber's commercial insurance cover the incident, even though Muzzaraf was not actively transporting an Uber customer at the time.

Rather than focusing on the causes for the incident, such as lack of driver patience or inadequate driver training, the attention has been shifted to avoid examining some of the deeper issues that create dangerous situations on our roadways. The death of young Sophia Liu will be trivialized in an effort to create a bigger story and the responsibility of the driver, Muzzaraf, will be minimized, allowing him to slip out of the limelight. If instead we focused on the underlying causes for the problems and made solutions to treat them instead of always only addressing the symptoms that bubble to the surface, we could help prevent these types of incidents in the first place.

We hope that Sophia's mother will recover from her injuries and our deepest sympathies go out to the Liu family for their loss.

Editorial: Americans have given up on being better drivers

Image courtesy of beaubeen.com

It saddens me to even compose this, but this study by the AAA Foundation seems to point towards more Americans taking bad driving behaviors less seriously that in past years. What worries me the most is not just that we are less aware of how these bad driving behaviors affect other drivers on the road, but the fact that an increasing number of individuals seem to suffer from "do as I say, not as I do" syndrome. The fact that there are so many people who are quick to condemn, but not alter their own behavior just goes to show the ever increasingly selfish streak that our society seems to be developing. I realize that I sound like a ranting, crotchety old man, but it frustrates me to no end because of how often I have recently had run-ins with people who were so inattentive or dangerous behind the wheel that they nearly caused an accident. The worst part is that this is entirely preventable.