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We took the intersection for a minute and a half of silence. It was a bit harder to do without bikes. One car drove over the sidewalk behind me to get by. A couple honked but mostly they behaved.
The design of the intersection itself is really oddly aligned. The crosswalk is a bit to the east of the actual intersection which is where the pedestrian was hit. Doug timed the north/south light. 30 seconds I think he said. Quite short. As we were leaving I noticed it turned yellow before we had got through it. These things increase the possibility that the light was not red when the cyclist started into the intersection but I'm only guessing (hoping?) on that.
The whole event felt strange to me and I had to shift my usual memorial thinking around a bit. As usual I was trying to absolve the cyclist of any wrong (generally I look at intersection design) but this time there was not a dead cyclist to feel bad about but an even more vulnerable road user. It was really hard to think straight about it.
Several people have questioned whether ARC might be straying from its core values by supporting this memorial. On average one pedestrian a week is killed by a car in Toronto yet we chose to be involved in the first pedestrian memorial when the pedestrian was killed by a bike.
I think the reasoning behind our involvement was sound (solidarity with pedestrians, trying to move on our call for a right-of-way hierarchy, etc.) but maybe we should be thinking about where we go from here. Involvement with other groups might be confusing our stand. Or maybe it could help to advance one of our mandates (grassroots agitation directed at changing our society's dependence on the automobile). Let's talk about this at our next meeting.
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