Back to School and Bicycle Safety Campaign, Tuesday, September 8 to Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Back to School and Bicycle Safety Campaign, Tuesday, September 8 to Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Tuesday, September 8, 2020 - 10:10 AM
Traffic Services:  416-808-1900

September means ‘Back to School’ for thousands of Toronto students and the Toronto Police Service will be out on our city’s roads reminding people about the importance of road safety.

While the return to school is usually the focus for September, the Service will also be promoting ‘Bike Month ’- an event regularly held in June – to raise awareness of cycling safety.

The joint ‘Back to School’ and ‘Bicycle Safety’ campaign was launched on Tuesday, September 8, 2020, at Keelesdale Junior Public School, alongside the Mayor and other partners. The campaign will run until Wednesday, September 30, 2020.

By launching these campaigns together, the Service can focus traffic enforcement efforts and increase public awareness in a bid to improve the safety of school children, cyclists and all other road users.

With emphasis on enforcement, education and community engagement, officers will be looking out for drivers who speed, drive aggressively and drive distracted or impaired. Officers will also be in school zones targeting those who are parked illegally or vehicles potentially putting others at risk. Often, these behaviours lead to frustration, congestion and an unsafe environment for all road users.

The campaign also ties in with Toronto's Vision Zero Road Safety Plan which sees the Service, the City and other partners work together to achieve zero deaths on our roads. While the Service’s priority is educating people about their behaviours, current Vision Zero Enforcement Team officers will continue to take action where necessary and a permanent dedicated team will be out on our city’s streets later this fall.

A full announcement with specifics of the permanent team will be released closer to the time but members will be highly visible and strategically deployed throughout the city. The officers will conduct intelligence-led enforcement activities in locations determined by data from collisions, speed monitoring and more.

Year to date, the current team has issued more than 24,000 tickets for a variety of driving offences, while collisions that have caused life-threatening injuries have nearly halved compared to last year – 56 as of September 4, 2019 and 28 as of September 4, 2020.

For more news, visit TPSnews.ca.

Sergeant Jason Kraft, Traffic Services for Superintendent Scott Baptist, Traffic Services