Bradford says Toronto has neither safer roads nor less congestion. Deaths back him up. Injuries and the City's own traffic index don't.

2025 was Toronto’s second-safest year on the roads since 1998

Bradford’s post is a reply. Chow had written that she was working with the province on “a path forward that keeps every road user safe.” He answered: “We don’t have safer roads or less congestion.”

The City publishes the number. In its Vision Zero Annual Report 2025: 39 people were killed on Toronto’s roads in 2025, a 50% reduction since 2016, when the Road Safety Plan was adopted, and the second lowest count since the City was amalgamated in 1998.

Serious injuries moved the same way. The report puts 2025 serious injury collisions at 228 confirmed, revised to an estimated 255 once the known reporting delay is accounted for: a 24% reduction since 2016, and the third lowest since amalgamation apart from the two pandemic years.

That is the record his sentence is answering, and the accounting is the City’s own.

Deaths in 2026 are running at a seven-year high

He has real ground here, and it is stronger than the version he gave.

Using the City’s open collision data, and counting only January to June so every year is compared over identical months:

Jan to Jun	People killed	Seriously injured	Total
2019	25	142	167
2020	14	109	123
2021	14	116	130
2022	24	94	118
2023	17	122	139
2024	20	122	142
2025	21	105	126
2026	25	87	112

2020 and 2021 saw large falls in travel activity; the City excludes them from its own comparisons for that reason.

Twenty-five people were killed on Toronto’s roads in the first half of 2026, more than in any first half since 2019, and eight more than in the same period of 2023. Thirteen of the twenty-five were pedestrians. February 2026 was the worst month for pedestrian and cyclist collisions since 2020.

Anyone who followed this spring will recognise what he is pointing at. His sentence takes something true and stretches it across the whole record.

Two things temper it, and both come from the City. The 2026 figures are provisional and collision data arrives on a lag, so they can be revised upward. The Vision Zero report also notes that “the number of fatalities each year fluctuates more than serious injuries.” The count has swung between 17 and 25 in the first half of every year since 2019 without establishing a direction.

Serious injuries have fallen in every year of the term

The other column of that table runs the opposite way, and it runs that way consistently. Serious injuries in the first half of the year: 122 in 2023, 122 in 2024, 105 in 2025, 87 in 2026. That is a 29% fall, and 2026 is the lowest figure in the series.

Serious injuries are the larger number by roughly four to one, and by the City’s own account the steadier one. On the measure that moves least at random, Toronto’s roads are measurably safer than when Chow took office in July 2023.

Combining both columns into the standard “killed or seriously injured” figure gives 139 in the first half of 2023 against 112 in 2026, a 19% fall.

The City’s own travel-time index went down 12% downtown

The second half of his sentence is about congestion, and there the only official measurement also points away from him.

From the Congestion Management Plan 2026 Spring Update, reported to the Infrastructure and Environment Committee in March:

The TTI, a broad aggregate indicator focused on vehicle travel, shows reductions in average travel time in 2025 versus 2024, most notably a twelve per cent reduction in the downtown core and three per cent reduction citywide during the evening peak hour in the months when construction activity is highest.

This is weaker evidence than it looks, and the weakness belongs on the record: an administration measuring its own performance, over a single year against a single year, in one peak hour of one season. It is still the only published number, and it moves down.

Congestion remains severe by the City’s own account

Toronto’s congestion is still bad, and the City says so itself. The same report that records the improvement warns that “the drivers of congestion … have not substantially changed, indicating that the issue will remain a significant challenge,” and the plan attached to it commits $299.4 million over 2026 to 2028 because the problem is unsolved.

A candidate is entitled to argue that this is not good enough, that a 3% citywide improvement is invisible from inside a car, or that eight additional deaths in six months is the number that should govern. Any of those would be a claim about the record.

“We don’t have safer roads or less congestion” says the record shows nothing. The record shows a mixed picture in which most of the measured quantities moved the way Chow says they did: deaths across 2025, serious injuries across three years, and the City’s travel-time index.

This is rated Missing Context rather than something harsher because the deterioration he points at is real. What he does with it is describe one half of a split record as though it were the whole.

How to check this yourself

The collision figures come from the City’s open dataset Motor Vehicle Collisions Involving Killed or Seriously Injured Persons, refreshed 14 August 2026 with records through 2 August 2026. Each row is one person involved; the counts above are people whose injury is recorded as Fatal or Major, filtered to collision dates in January through June of each year.

One discrepancy should be named. That dataset records 40 people killed in 2025, while the Vision Zero report says 39. The definitions differ slightly in scope. We have used the City’s published figure when citing 2025 and the dataset when comparing periods within it, and the gap does not move any finding here.