Toronto still suffers from a mass delusion that has unreasonably placed too much importance on cars, car drivers, and car infrastructure.

The effect of cars in Toronto manifests as a disease - an auto-immune disorder of the society - in which the population kills itself and cannot stop.

For issues such as murder, society broadly condemns such activity - and it’s a complete package for handling murder: from the funding, to the professions, to the law, to the near-unanimous social shunning of murders.

But a society sick in this way has a blind spot for the suffering caused by cars - here, in Toronto - but in a lot of other places too. For far too long, the narrative around car crashes has been sympathetic, with multiple commenters coming to reddit to post apologias for the drivers, not the victims. “I understand how they did it; that intersection is bad” and stuff of that nature.

The end result is a society unable to regulate itself; unable to even see the problem, much less take steps to fix it.

But I have seen so much improvement in Toronto in this regard, over the past many years. I think the Ford/Tory years have set Toronto back a decade - but I’ve seen the social temperature shift.

The Star have clearly made the editorial choice to include the driver of the car in the headlines - to plainly state that the driver is the one responsible, here. This is new and it is progress.

I am so happy to see all of the GTA transit content producers. Perhaps the most popular channel on YouTube for bike/transit commentary - Not Just Bikes - is straight outta Fake London. Others like RM Transit are doing such a good job dissecting the mechanisms of transit and infrastructure.

And the Toronto subreddit itself has shifted to be far less pro-car and far less hostile towards bikes, transit, and pedestrians. Truly, a decade ago, these threads would be a wall of misanthropes: blaming the victim, excusing the driver, and doing the hard work of litigating the tragedy on behalf of the responsible parties.

Despite all this, practically each day in Toronto there are headlines about people maimed and killed by cars, often somewhere along an urban, highway-style residential street. Some days there are none, other days there are multiple.

We don’t need to produce a ranking of human suffering in Toronto to know that cars aren’t the worst of it. But cars produce a form of suffering that is experienced pretty evenly across society, personally intruding into almost each of our lives daily.

In a utilitarian sense, Cars in Toronto could be among the largest “happiness taxes” that we pay by being miserable in traffic, on transit, watching our backs as pedestrians and cyclists. We pay the tax when we see these headlines, when we think about how this affects kids, and through the opportunity cost of funding car infrastructure instead of services that would increase happiness and reduce suffering.

I think curing Toronto’s car sickness is one of the most obvious ways to improve our quality of life, overall. Many other problems are much harder to solve - but with cars, I think the return on investment from curing Toronto’s car sickness is unusually massive. And even better, the research has been done for us, around the world, during the past 50 years. Better road designs are published in books!

As long as we see headlines like this on a regular basis, I can tell Toronto isn’t ready to get healthy, yet.