Toronto Traffic Safety Culture

Without diving too deep into statistics. Toronto is 4x the size of Denver at 3.2 million residents vs 715,000 residents.  

Toronto - 2025 - 67,542 crashes, 42 fatalities, 10,010 injury crashes; impaired driving charges 2,304

Denver - 2025 - 16,144 crashes, 68 fatalities, 4,017 injury crashes; impaired driving charges ~1,600

I was in Toronto on a family vacation.  I drove from Buffalo, New York straight into downtown Toronto.  I spent 4 days in the city mostly walking around, but also utilizing a car, street rail, subway, bicycle, bus, ferry and Uber.

I was struck by how similar the signage and striping was to Denver.  Green painted bike lanes and bike boxes were utilized.  There was a leading bicycle interval in addition to the leading pedestrian interval at intersections.  Red light running cameras were utilized.  Traffic calming in the form of speed humps were around the University of Toronto campus.

In terms of differences, there seemed to be less parking and I did not notice any two-way-left-turn lanes.  I am a patient driver and often found myself waiting 2-3 cars deep when someone was making a left turn.  I did not notice cars whipping around me or laying on the horn.  Everybody just kind of went on there way.

The number of conflict points was astronomical.  There were one-way streets, but I found myself on mostly two-way streets (1 or 2 lanes in both directions).  I had to keep an eye out for cars, bicycles and pedestrians as well as scooters, e-bikes, motorcycles, motorized wheel chairs.

What impressed me the most was the safety culture.  There was no lane ownership, accelerating so people could not merge in front of drivers, red light running and I did not notice speeding (significant speed disparities between lanes).  Everybody just kind of went about their business.

When driving to Niagara Falls, I did notice signs that said speeds in excess of 150 km/hour (considered stunt driving 50 km/hour over the posted speed limit 100 km/hour) would result in 30 day license suspension, 14 day vehicle impoundment and significant fines.  For perspective that is 30 mph over a 65 mph posted limit which I feel like I see every day in Colorado.

Combining the statistics which I looked up afterwards with my personal experience tells me that given its size, Toronto has roughly the similar level of crashes as Denver, but most are property damage only or injury.  Fatal crashes are at 1.3/100,000 vs 9.5/100,000 were remarkably lower.  This is likely due to lower speeds, multimodal travel options, but also traffic safety culture.