Cyclist Fatality in London Ontario With Absolutely No Disclosure
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Such is the well-known proverb. In London Ontario the combined actions and inactions of many entities with “good intentions” lead to the deaths of many of London’s citizens. The most recent example of a cyclist fatality in east London on April 28, 2025, is just another example of the mentioned proverb.
The only official mention of the fatal cyclist collision occurred in a news segment by the local CTV News agency which provided a short description on its daily evening news. CTV also posted a similar description on its website. It was said that a 49-year-old cyclist was killed. The only useful information from CTV was that 3 photos were made available and only one of those provided a view that was close enough to the collision site that, at least, minimal information could be obtained. The single useful photo showed, what appeared to be, the rest position of a cycle in the westbound curb lane of Dundas Street next to a fire hydrant, west of the Vancouver Street crossroad. However we cannot show that photo here on this website because CTV and the reporter who took the photo claim copyright to it. So whatever use could be made of the photo to provide education to the public is nullified.
London City Police also have a part to play in hiding the important circumstances of the fatality. Nothing was mentioned in the press releases on its website. Not a single photo was provided of the collision site, and no mention was made as to how and why the collision occurred.
A number of cyclists and cycling organizations also typically involve themselves in comments on recent cyclist collisions. Many of these persons hold strong opinions about how collisions occur and what needs to be done to prevent those collisions. But it is unclear how many of these persons actually have any detailed information about the present fatality, or about any cyclist fatality in London. It is highly unlikely that they have that information because police do not release that information. Yet cyclists and their organizations do not express any public frustration over the fact that they should have the information they do not have.
Government officials also contribute their piece of good intentions. They enact legislation that makes it against the law for cyclists to ride on a sidewalk, regardless of the circumstances. So impressionable or inexperienced cyclists, even knowing that they might be unsafe on a urban road, ride in the lane accompanied by motor vehicle traffic because that is the law. Whether this was a factor in the present fatality is unknown. But essentially nothing is known about this fatality.
Gorski Consulting has monitored the activities of cyclists in London in substantial detail in the last 5 years and observations have been made along Dundas Street in the vicinity of Vancouver Street. However without knowing exactly where the impact occurred, or anything about the damage to the motor vehicle or cycle, we are limited in our ability to comment. What remains is to show some general views of the area and what cyclist observations were made in the recent past.
The Accident Site
The images below are taken from Googlemaps and provide some general indication of the characteristics of the accident site. The first image below shows a general view of Dundas Street near Vancouver. The news media showed that the struck cycle was lying in the westbound lane of Dundas next to a fire hydrant.
The image below shows a view looking northwest, from Vancouver Street and toward the location of the fire hydrant where the struck cycle was found.
An the next image shows a view looking east along Dundas Street toward the location of the fire hydrant.
These views show that Dundas Street is an arterial roadway which has no facilities for cyclists. An experienced cyclist should know this. But again, it is unclear if the cyclist was actually riding in the westbound lane or crossing Dundas Street, or something else entirely.
Poor Road Surface Conditions
Recent views of the westbound lane of Dundas Street show that its surface was in poor condition. A westbound cyclist travelling close to the curb in this lane might be influenced to steer around the various road problems and potentially into the path of an approaching motor vehicle. The photos below, taken on May 6, 2025, show the extent of some of these road surface problems.
Since absolutely nothing was revealed about the cyclist fatality no one can know whether these poor road surface conditions had any relation to how and why the collision occurred.
Observations of Cyclists Near The Collision Site
Gorski Consulting has been monitoring cyclists behaviours and characteristics throughout the streets of London for many years. Specific attention has been paid to arterial roadways such as Dundas Street between Highbury Ave and Clarke Road. This road segment is about 2.4 kilometres in distance. The accident site at Vancouver Street is about halfway within that distance.
The following table shows the number of cyclists observed on Dundas Street between Highbury Ave and Clarke Road between the years 2022 and 2024.
The above table shows that a very large percentage (89.8%) of observed cyclists were found to be riding on the sidewalk as opposed to riding within the curb lane. This is in direct contravention to the law in London and in the Province of Ontario which prohibits such behaviour. Yet, the cycle in the current fatal collision was found within the westbound lane, suggesting that the cyclist was possibly in that lane when struck. At least the cyclist was unlikely to be riding on the north sidewalk when struck. However this would suggest that a rare event occurred because cyclists are not normally found riding within the roadway in this road segment. Again, nothing has been revealed as to the actual circumstances surrounding the collision.
A sample of the types of cyclists observed near the collision location will be presented here and it will be seen that all these cyclists were found to be riding on the north sidewalk, not within the westbound lane of Dundas.
Discussion
Much can be learned and understood about how fatal collisions occur and how to prevent them if officials were cooperative in releasing basic information about those tragedies. Unfortunately this is not occurring. What is occurring is that local cycling groups gather at an accident site and then attach a white “ghost bike” to the area. And the ghost bike rests there for a few years until someone removes it. Examples of these memorials in London are shows below.
The above photos are all taken from Hamilton Road which has been notorious for cyclist fatal collisions. Nothing has been improved on Hamilton Road because there has been no information released about how those fatal collisions occurred. And the same result is likely to occur at the current site on Dundas at Vancouver.
The quote at the beginning of this article is repeated again: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. That quote can now be changed with respect to cyclist collisions in London Ontario: “The road to hell is built on false intentions”. This is because all involved are distributing propaganda about the importance of road safety, and how they want to improve the safety of cyclists, but those comments are false. If they were true all involved would sit down and study how those cyclist collisions are occurring and make that information known, both to drivers of motor vehicles and to cyclists.
Child’s “Severe Injuries” Under Questionable Circumstances While News Media Appear Muzzled
Why and how did a child sustain “severe injuries” in an unexplained collision in Vaughan, Ontario on Saturday, April 19, 2025? The minimal disclosed information is that the incident occurred at Cold Creek and Kirby Roads, but that is of no help in explaining what occurred. The collision reportedly involved 2 vehicles and therefore at least 2 drivers must have been involved. Yet official news media quoted police that only one adult suffered minor injuries.
At Gorski Consulting we are much more familiar with injury causation in motor vehicle collisions than the average consumer of collision news. Zygmunt Gorski has spent 10 years reconstructing those circumstances by conducting detailed examinations of involved vehicles, mapping the location of occupants contacts in vehicle interiors and matching injuries to those contacts. This familiarity includes the probability that a child should sustain “severe injuries” yet no adult sustains any significant injuries in a two-vehicle collision. It is our view that the reported circumstances do not make sense without the occurrence of something unusual that should not occur. Yet no one has questioned authorities about this.
Children have a limited ability to protect themselves from injury when adults do not protect them. And disclosure about why children sustain injury should not be limited to a select few who could have vested interests in concealing how and why those injuries occur.
Cycling in Stump City, Formerly Forest City
While cycling this weekend my friends eventually rode into the “forks of the Thames” as the popular area where citizens are encouraged to meet in the downtown of the City of London Ontario. When we arrived we were horrified to see the destruction, not by weather events, or Canadian beavers, or even war or pestilence. The trees that had been placed by a previous administration to commemorate London as the “Forest City” were all cut down. One of my friends appropriately remarked “This is no longer the Forest City, we are now Stump City”.
It is an example of the destruction that the City puts on itself for no logical reason and without citizen knowledge or approval. An area that was pleasant for cyclists to meet will now be a wasteland as the City prepares another grand project similar to the disasters of the past.
Driving Public Continues To Be Misled & Uninformed In Ontario
The driving public in Ontario has two choices: either be misled by social media or be misinformed by official news media. Such conclusions are repeatedly demonstrated whenever a serious collision occurs on the roads of the Province of Ontario in Canada. Both social news media and official news media follow their own predictable scripts.
In the world of social media there will be occasions where a member of the public has come across a collision site and snaps a photo which is subsequently posted on their selected social media site. From this will come hundreds or even thousands of replies about what likely happened or who was at fault. Many of these comments are created by trolls whose purposeful design is to create nonsense content. And many are created by persons who may honestly believe what they write but have no clue about the basics of physics, collision causation or interpretation of physical evidence. In this make-believe world everything is possible and believable, as long as the public is gullible enough to believe the persuasive comments of someone who “speaks their language”. This is the age of “Donald Trumpism”.
On the flip side is the misinformation provided by official news media. In the present age official news media are riding on the coat-tails of their predecessors before the internet. In those years of a “real free press” there were multitudes of news agencies competing against each other to provide the most accurate news in the quickest time-frame. In those pre-internet years news agencies had numerous investigative reporters who existed, not only in large metropolitan centres, but even in small towns. If you did not get the story, or if you did not get it right, your opposing news agency would expose you and the public would know. But as the internet and social media took form, official news agencies began to drop off, first in the smaller towns and then into the bigger centres. Almost every independent newspaper died. Those official news agencies that survived were bought out by large corporations that created the appearance that the original independent agency was still in existence while in reality they became all the same, owned by the same conglomerate. Even these large corporate news agencies could not afford to have investigative reporters in every town. And even the large unban centres could not afford to keep paying the salaries of investigative reporters. It became standard policy to create news stories from a template, minimal originality and specific facts, just a standard form in which you simply paste the details of collision location, names of the involved and so on. The present status quo is dangerously on the edge of complete misinformation and a threat to democracy as a whole.
Historically, the public in Ontario has never been properly informed about the dangers of transportation incidents on public roadways. Previously this was partly due to the lack of information possessed by collision investigators. Before the 21st century collision reconstruction methods were much different than they are now and the methods required time-consuming analysis involving interpretation of physical evidence and application theoretical principles such as conservation of momentum and energy transfer/dissipation. By the time a useful result was available many weeks or months could pass by and much of the public would no longer be interested in that result.
In today’s age collision analysis can still be time-consuming but certain results can be obtained sometimes in hours. As almost all passenger vehicles are equipped with event data recorders (“black boxes”) it is theoretically possible to conduct a download of collision data shortly after investigative personnel arrive, if they have the proper downloading hardware to do so. Unfortunately the complications of our world mean that vehicle manufacturers do not cooperate with government agencies to create a single, universal downloading device. The numerous independent hardware means that investigative agencies have difficulty paying for them and many important incidents fall to the wayside. Although precise and detailed data is often available investigative personnel will never reveal that data to the public, unless forced to do so during a trial that could occur many years in the future. By then the public is no longer involved and loses interest. Even at trial official news reporters simply have little or no knowledge about collision reconstruction analyses, let alone the legal minds of the lawyers and judges who try to present the image that they know what they are talking about. In most instances neither lawyers, or their experts, are sufficiently independent enough to provide an accurate account of how a person died or was seriously injured. How can such a process filter down to official news reporters and then onto the public that needs to hear/see/read the truth?
Accounts of serious collisions are also focused primarily on bringing an offender to “justice” by throwing them in jail. Once that is deemed to be sufficient the legal process moves onto the next party. At no point is there any serious attempt to identify road safety dangers stemming beyond the offending driver.
In serious and independent road safety research the acronym “HVE” is understood and applied. HVE refers to the words Human, Vehicle and Environment. These are broad references to the main causes of road transportation incidents. They indicate that collision causes, and even more importantly Injury causes, come from human, vehicular and environmental factors. Agencies such as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) know this acronym very well and apply it even though they may not make reference to it. These agencies have the least conflict of interest with respect to collision and injury causation. Unfortunately their investigations are very few. The vast majority of transportation incidents receive no such independent and properly, scientific scrutiny.
The bottom line is that, in the Province of Ontario, the public has absolutely no credible, reliable, and independent information about how and why their counter-parts are being injured or killed. It is akin to placing the public in a duck shoot in some amusement park: a shooter is given a gun in an attempt to strike one of the line of ducks passing by on some conveyor belt. The shooter rarely makes contact but the ducks have no way of protecting themselves or of stopping the insane process. This is the apparatus that exists in real-life on Ontario roads. The driving public is the “line-of-ducks” moving along Ontario roads with no knowledge when they may have the luck of being the victim of a transportation tragedy. They have no way of protecting themselves because they have no knowledge of how the previous “duck” became injured or killed. That knowledge is available to the selected few who have access to the detailed investigations of police who have exclusive jurisdiction over the collected evidence. But the public will never see that. What the public gets is misleading commentary on social media which may have no basis in reality, or they can be misinformed by the lack of information provided by official news agencies.
Harsh Winter In Southern Ontario Affects Cycling Observations
The winter season of 2024-2025 was particularly harsh in Southern Ontario. Almost reminiscent of those years in the 1970s where major storms shut down many Ontario cities for several days at a time. In contrast the winter of 2023-2024 was essentially non-existent with no snow rarely making an appearance. These extremes may indicate the upcoming climate change with may bring unpredictable and extreme contrasts. This is the reason for making adjustments to our transportation systems by using less fossil fuels. Active transportation, including cycling, has been identified as an important component of transportation change to fight climate change. This article will review what happened in this past winter in this important battle in London, Ontario.
View of This Year’s Winter Conditions in London Ontario
In late November, 2024 it looked like winter was going to be another non-existent season in London. But then on the evening of December a winter storm came in and the snowfall began, one of many throughout this season.
Cycling In The Winter Season
One factor that became prominent in London is how a harsh winter affects cyclists. This information is not collected or known in the region except through the articles published on the Gorski Consulting website.
The problem is displayed in the following two photos showing how snow accumulation limits cycling.
Cycling is difficult in London every winter. But the current winter season has been exceptionally difficult. And this has affected what could be observed during studies of cyclists by Gorski Consulting. Because of the lack of observed cyclists Gorski Consulting had to focus harder on finding them. Thus, even though a similar number of cyclists have been documented during this winter season as in previous years this is only because there was greater effort put forward to finding them.
For cyclist documentation purposes the winter season has been arbitrarily selected by Gorski Consulting to comprise the four months of December, January, February and March. When looking at a full year of cyclist observations the following data has been observed in London:
Year 2021 % Female = 12.54
Year 2022 % Female = 13.11
Year 2023 % Female = 14.60
Year 2024 % Female = 12.54
In contrast winter observations show a substantially lower percentage of female cyclists in London, as shown in the table below.
For the three winter seasons combined (2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24) the average female observations were only 8.50%. However female observations for the current season (2024-25) were only 3.46%. The present data should suggest that the harsh winter conditions of the current season have sharply reduced the number of female cyclists riding on London’s roads. And, overall, female cyclists have already been noted to be a small percentage compared to male cyclists.
Winter remains a difficult time to identify cyclist characteristics such as gender and helmet use. It has been observed that cyclist are less likely to wear helmets in winter conditions. However many cyclists were big hoods over their heads and in some cases it is difficult to know if a helmet is being worn under the hood. Similarly, the quantity of winter clothing makes it more difficult to identify the cyclist’s gender.
Summary
Cycling in London and throughout the Province of Ontario Canada has recently seen some head winds. The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, recently announced that he will legislate the removal of cycling lanes along certain arterial roadways in Toronto. He also introduced legislation that will require provincial approval for the installation of any future cycling lanes that take away lanes from motor vehicle traffic. Yet it has been a recent understanding throughout the western world that we need more cyclist to combat carbon emissions and slow down climate change.
In London, Ontario there are a number of arterial roadways where cycling is dangerous because there is no infrastructure to accommodate cyclists. An example of this is the older portion of Hamilton Road in east London that runs between Maitland Street and Highbury Ave. The City of London had already made plans to remove a lane in each direction of travel to install cycling lanes but that decision may now be in jeopardy if Doug Ford’s government prevents this. Meanwhile the City’s and the Province’s official stance is that cyclists must not ride on sidewalks but must ride within the lanes shared with motor vehicle traffic. These official mandates place cyclists in serious danger.
The lack of safety for cyclists on London’s streets can often be estimated by the number of female cyclists observed on them. The less female cyclists the less likely that the road is safe for all cyclists. The current cycling season has shown that harsh winter conditions also play a role in reduction of female cyclists.
Gorski Consulting continues to provide observations of cyclists in London for the important reason that, with the expected increase in cyclist volumes, cyclist safety will become a greater issue. Up to now Gorski Consulting in the only entity in the region of London, Ontario that provides free distribution of cyclist observations and the dangers that exist to cycling.
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