Street sense
A 65-year-old woman died on Monday after an address mix-up resulted in the ambulance going to a street on essentially the other side of the city.Ever since the amalgamation of the boroughs of Toronto, East York, Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke to create the mega city of Toronto in 1998, this issue has come up time and again, although I haven't heard of anything this serious.
There are reportedly 96 street names that are dubplicates and amazingly 4 that are triplicates. This causes issues for not only ambulances, but to a lesser extent food delivery people, taxis, the post office and more.
As I was watching the news tonight I found that many people interviewed appeared to actually be against the possible changing of their street name should the situation warrant it. Their arguments were incredibly asinine, especially when in the end the issue comes down to saving peoples lives. One man said he'd lived on the street all his life and he'd grown comfortable with it being that name. Another woman said she had taught her four and seven year old children the street name, but if it changed she would have to teach them again! poor people!
This issue should have been fixed when the boroughs joined nearly nine years ago. Instead, what the incredibly smart city did was spend $500,000 on a commission to look into it; they ended up voting to keep the names the same!
It's unfortunate some innocent woman had to die to get people's attention on this issue. I hope the city now moves quickly on this issue so as to potentially save more lives; even if it's at the cost of those poor people not liking the change.
posted by Sean @ 11:13 PM
Comments: 11
