The Local
Project: The Deadly Inequality of Toronto’s Vision Zero Rollout
The Local explored the rollout of a road safety project called Vision Zero in Toronto by analyzing the rate of injuries and deaths happening on Toronto streets due to vehicle collisions. The team surmised that in some parts of the city, the rollout of the Vision Zero Road safety project over the last five years had been a failure - particularly in areas where vulnerable populations lived. The team wanted to understand why. And they wanted to investigate the role that municipal politics played in the rollout ahead of the upcoming elections.
Toronto, Canada
https://thelocal.to
Interview with Inori Roy, associate editor, The Local
Time:
Six months
Technology used:
Excel
Google Sheets
Google Pinpoint
DocumentCloud
Flourish
How it started:
The issue hadn't really been covered to any significant detail by other publications in the city, despite a known crisis of road safety - it was treated like random happenstance, without examining the systemic issues shaping road safety development, infrastructure and built environment. The newsroom wanted to take a systemic approach to looking at something that had previously just been treated as a series of individual events contributing to a crisis, with no critical thinking around why.
Challenges:
The team thought that the municipality housed records on which councilor made which decisions regarding road safety and infrastructure. But because the records weren’t housed systematically, the team had to individually look at every single motion put forward around a road safety or infrastructure change. Initially using a metric of 30 different road safety changes, they narrowed it down to four - signals, stop signs, speed bumps and crosswalks - and did an analysis of each motion containing one of the keywords. These results were then cataloged.
Data/Documents:
Municipal data on the new road safety program
Municipal data on citizen requests for stop signs or speed signs
Demographic data
Data on speeding in the city by neighborhood
Created catalog of councilor and motions made
Impact:
After publication, the newsroom heard from a few municipal councilors that they would change the way they approached road safety - move to a proactive approach versus a reactive approach because of the newsroom’s findings.
As road safety is an important issue in the city, the project also equipped activists and organizers with information for their own work. This year, city staff proposed the first of two new approaches to road safety implementation that prioritize equity and proactive infrastructure developments.
Finally, it reaffirmed to the newsroom’s audiences that the publication can do this type of big-data work, which is not common among news outlets in Toronto.
Advice:
Make sure to manage your time well. Stretch the project out over your timeline versus keeping it on a backburner and then sprinting the last few weeks. That process is not sustainable.
Spatial analysis is your friend. Maps tell you different data stories.
One of the earlier successes of this project was mapping out what they could to identify if there was even a story there.
Data should be the means to the end, not the end itself. Data should not be the focus of the project, but rather the impact the data has on the people. See it as a vehicle to push for something more that allows you for a greater connection with your reader and allows you to move your audiences more.