Lack of Transparency of In-Vehicle Surveillance Programs
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is drafting new legislation that will require the monitoring of drivers with cameras that evaluate the drivers ability to safely control their vehicle. Infrared sensors will track eye movement, pupil dilation, glances and head nods indicative of drowsiness. These sensors will be combined with Artificial Intelligence to prevent vehicle “ignition” if impairment is determined. This law will reportedly come into effect with 2027 model vehicles.
The new technology will add a few hundred dollars to the cost of a new vehicle while it is expected to save between 9,000 and 10,000 lives annually.
It is known that impaired driving is a major safety concern. Technology that can drastically reduce impaired driving is a valuable safety benefit. However, too often, governments and their agencies are shortsighted in understanding the repercussions of such legislation. They only see the benefit that is conveyed to them while not seeing the broader picture of how the public might react to the legislation. This technology will allow the collection of very detailed personal information while there has been no explanation as to how that information will be safe-guarded from unauthorized collection and use. It is a common problem that governments and their representatives do not understand the meaning of transparency, or they know it, but are unwilling to abide by it.
Public backlash is not unheard of. Recently the Ontario government of Doug Ford made it illegal for municipalities to use speed cameras to monitor speeding drivers. This was largely successful because municipalities in Ontario were secretive about how the programs were used. Ford was able to suggest that the cameras were a “cash grab” and were not being used to improve road safety. The cash grab was likely because the threshold for designating speeding was set too low and there were many drivers who were being fined for travelling minimally above the posted speed. However that specific threshold was never publicly disclosed, neither by Ford nor by the municipalities. So a valuable tool that could have saved many lives in Ontario was scraped because there was insufficient transparency over how the tool was being used. This is how the same circumstance could befall the monitoring of drivers for impairment. Failure to involve the public and failure to be transparent with the public is a recipe for failure of any secretive government program.
Continued Non-Reporting of Facts From Collision In South-West London Ontario
Gorski Consulting has previously reported ( October 11 and November 23, 2025) on the strange reporting of a fatal collision that occurred on November 3, 2020 at the intersection of Southdale Road and White Oak Road in London, Ontario. Those articles are still available to be reviewed on this Gorski Consulting website. In the latest developments, the person charged by London Police, Bahaa Ali, was reportedly found guilty of dangerous driving causing death. It had been reported that Ali tried to convince the court that he was not the driver of the Mercedes that struck a Hyundai Sonata and killed a passenger in the Sonata, Joan Clubb. The judge did not believe the bazaar explanation. Ali’s sentencing is reportedly set for April 24, 2026.
For those following the Gorski Consulting articles, we have tried to explain that the physical evidence visible in the collision photos did not support the conclusion that Ali was travelling at 129 km/h at the time of the impact. Also we have tried to explain that, although the collision was of a substantial severity, one should not expect that the passenger of the Sonata should have died, particularly when she was initially reported (by CTV News London) to be alert and communicating with paramedics but that “…things would take a turn for the worse and Clubb would die in hospital“. None of these issues were reported to the public except through the Gorski Consulting articles and very few persons review those articles compared to the vast audience attracted by official news media.
When important matters like these are not publicly disclosed it is not just a trivial matter. Public understanding and opinion is shaped by what is reported and what is not reported. As has been apparent in the wider field of life, the public’s manipulation through misinformation and fake news is a growing problem. Without falling into a state of paranoia we need to be critical of what we are told to believe, think about the purpose of the message and what the messenger may be attempting to manipulate. With the advent of postings on the internet’s social media the navigational beacons that have kept professional, investigative journalism within a somewhat reasonable range of truth have been replaced by social media “influencers”. Anyone can now post anything about anything. And if that posting is capable of capturing a large group of impressionable persons truth does not matter. You cannot be fired for misrepresenting the truth if you are not a professional journalist. That is a dangerous recipe.
The lack of reporting of important issues surrounding collisions in Ontario is nothing new. It has been going on since motor vehicles were introduced on public roads and likely existed before that when collisions involved horses and buggies and trains in the 1800s. However, as our society has evolved, our ability to understand how collisions occur and the methods and equipment we use to reconstruct those collisions have become much more sophisticated. We are now able to say, with much more scientific certainty, that these events occurred in a certain way, and were caused by certain factors. And when this analysis is done in an unbiased way it can be helpful in resolving many collision questions. Regrettably Ontario’s courtrooms, and the reports about how they function, have not kept up with these collision reconstruction advancements.
Cause of School Bus Fire Must Not Be Hidden
Minimal information was reported as to how and why a school bus caught fire on Innis Lake Road in Caledon East, north of Toronto, Ontario, on March 12, 2026. It was reported that 44 high school students and the bus driver were able to escape without injury. An article posted by CTV News in Barrie stated “Officials confirm the fire is not considered suspicious and appears to have been mechanical in nature” but that can mean many things.
“Not considered suspicous?”, what does that mean? Is it not relevant because someone believes the bus was not set on fire on purpose? Is that why officials recommend that we “move on, nothing to see here”? Does it matter whether the bus was set on fire on purpose or accidentally? Would either cause the potential of multiple deaths? Clearly there is a reason why we ought to know how and why the bus caught fire. Did the fire originate from a hot exhaust system? Did it originate from a wiring problem? Specifics are needed.
Nothing has been said about which bus operator owned the bus or who manufactured the bus. We can examine some the general characteristics of the bus in the above photo and we can come to some general conclusions.
The bus does not appear to be of an older vintage. As buses get older they begin to show warning signs that become displayed on the dash. Some of these warnings occur because certain sensors become aged and less functional. So something like a wheel sensor warning indicating a traction control issue may be of minimal concern. On older buses the engines do not work like they used to and we often see a “hot exhaust” warning and this may be a continual display on the bus without a simple remedy. But this is not a common problem on newer buses.
Diesel buses need Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) to keep the engine from getting clogged up and when this fluid is not topped up we can get overheating of the engine and exhaust. So it would be important to determine what was the status of the DEF before this bus caught fire.
In 2025 Gorski Consulting posted articles on July 28 and September 16, regarding electric school buses manufactured by Lion Electric Company of Quebec. Those buses were taken off the road after a Lion bus caught fire in Montreal in early September, 2025. So it would be helpful to determine whether the bus fire at Caledon was a Lion bus. However, no one has provided that important information.
Although there are several types of buses driven on roads in southern Ontario, a large number come from just a few manufacturers. Below is a photo taken of the rear of a Lion bus and if we compare its features to the photo of the burning bus at the beginning of this article it does not resemble a Lion bus.
The next photo below shows the rear end of an International bus and it too does not appear to match the features of the burning bus.
In the next photo we see the rear of a Thomas built bus and its features seem to be similar to those of the burning bus.
Thomas buses are built in North Carolina.
All persons involved in school bus transportation ought to be viewing this school bus fire with concern. As mentioned on this Gorski Consulting website so often, secrecy is of no help to anyone expect to those who have a vested interest in hiding something for which they should be accountable. All persons should be voicing their right to know how and why this bus caught fire.
BMW, Stellantis And Mercedes Benz Reducing Autonomous Vehicles to Level 2
Tesla is reportedly continuing with its ambitions to create fully autonomous vehicles, while other manufacturers have reversed course. While manufacturers such as BMW, Stellantis and Mercedes Benz had plans to create Level 3 autonomous vehicles, those plans have reportedly changed.
As reported last month by Brad Anderson of Carscoops, this reversal seems to be due to the costs involved. Level 3 systems would cost about $7,000 while a Level 2 system would only be about $1,700.
The when the BMW 7-Series arrives in 2027 it will reportedly contain many advanced features such as hands-free highway driving, automatic lane changes and advanced onboard navigation features.
While these systems advance, governments in the U.S. are becoming more concerned about personal information being collected and sold, such as geolocation and telemetrics data. Some companies are making it difficult for vehicle owners to opt out of certain features that gather their personal information. Government intervention these activities is likely to increase. In Canada there has been no discussion about government interventions up to this time.
Characteristics of Serious Pedestrian Collisions in Southern Ontario
Many pedestrians die or are severely injured in Ontario while why these tragedies occur is largely unknown by those who are dying and being injured. A large expense is incurred by employing police to document these incidents but then the results are transferred into a secretive holding facility that never sees that public’s light of day.
There are some favoured researchers who are given permission to see some of these results and those results are presented at various safety conferences. Those researchers meet, shake hands, and enter into discussions amongst themselves. But none of this ever reaches the eyes and ears of those being injured and killed.
The government of Ontario publishes the Ontario Road Safety Annual Report (ORSAR) which summarizes the results from Ontario’s police collision reports. The charts and tables contained in such reports are often misleading. While it would appear that the frequency of certain collision types is accurate one can look at the descriptions in articles published by local news-gathering organizations to recognize that those frequencies do not portray what is actually occurring on Ontario’s roads. Because collisions are classified according to the first harmful event results such as drownings or fires are rarely noted because they are almost always consequences that occur after the first harmful event.
The present article will focus on pedestrian collisions in southern Ontario. The vast majority of these collisions are never publicly reported. Nor is there any information about how and why they occurred. This leads to an examination of the small segment collisions that are the most severe because it is expected that many of these would be reported.
The data below is from Ontario’s Road Safety Annual Reports and provides some broad indication of the numbers of fatal collisions that have recently occurred.
Since nothing is available to understand how these collisions occurred the only available source is from published news media articles. But these are difficult to track. In many instances news organizations require that a person pay a fee to access their articles. While the numbers of news gathering organizations has declined rapidly in recent years it is still difficult to visit each one in a particular part of Ontario to see what pedestrian collisions have been reported. Gorski Consulting has attempted to document these articles where possible however there are areas of the province where such documentation was not possible.
The following table provides a summary of all the pedestrian collision articles that have been documented by Gorski Consulting between 2021 and 2025.
While there appears to be a rise in the number of collisions in 2024 and 2025, it must be understood that these frequencies may have little relationship to what has been occurring in Ontario because of the small number of incidents that have been documented, although further inquiry might been needed.
The next table may be more revealing because it displays the number of fatal pedestrian collisions. Here the data may be a little more accurate because fatal collisions are less likely to be unreported in Ontario.
The data from the above table can be compared to the ORSAR data shown at the beginning of this article. The ORSAR data shows that the number of fatal pedestrian collisions fluctuated around 100 incidents per year. And the Gorski Consulting data shows 38 to 61 collisions per year have documented in the Gorski Consulting review of news media articles. Again, it was not possible to canvas all areas of the province so it is understandable that about 50% of the fatal collisions have not been captured in the Gorski Consulting data.
However we can also examine the number of collisions where the injury results were described as “life-threatening” or “critical”. It would be expected that a significant number of such collisions would eventually result in fatalities but those fatalities would not necessarily be reported in an updated news article. The numbers of these additional collisions are shown in the next table.
So, while the Gorski Consulting data has missed about 50% of the fatal pedestrian collisions occurring in Ontario, a substantial number (22 to 36 per year) of additional collisions have been documented which were life-threatening and some of these would likely have turned into fatal results.
A surprisingly large number of pedestrian collisions reported in news media articles have involved hit-&-runs, as noted in the next table.
The 145 incidents of hit-&-run represents about 21.6% of the total 671 collisions that were documented. One might be tempted to believe that this is because a vehicle that strikes a pedestrian does not sustain significant damage and is therefore drivable. So drivers choose to escape.
Yet our experience is that there are a substantial number of drivers who do not detect that a collision has occurred, or they detect an impact but do not know what it was. There have been instances where drivers do not know what happened and it takes several seconds to comprehend that something has happened. Meanwhile the vehicle continues to travel down the road and this could be for several hundred metres. Upon exploration of the vehicle damage the driver comes to the realization that something has been struck and the driver returns to the area where the impact occurred. Meanwhile police conclude that the driver left the collision site on purpose and this becomes coded as a hit-&-run incident. The problem is that not all incidents of a vehicle leaving the site of a collision are the same and its takes some intelligence and experience with the evidence to make a correct assessment.
Correct interpretations of what happened in a pedestrian collision requires that the investigator obtains substantial experience in examining a large number of collisions. Regrettably, that is not always the case. Incorrect charges are laid and matters proceed to trial where a correct interpretation is not always guaranteed. When police, lawyers and judges do not have sufficient experience in these matters bad decisions are inevitable.
Some pedestrian collisions occur more frequently and it is important to recognize what factors have been at play. These issues will be discussed in the next segments of this article.
Trucks, Buses And Pedestrians
Serious pedestrian collisions often involve impacts by large vehicles such as trucks and buses. This can be seen in the news media articles. The incident of involvement by dump trucks can be seen in the following list of occurrences noted in the news media articles.
The next table shows pedestrian collisions involving transit buses.
And the final table shows pedestrian collisions involving school buses.
Although not noted in the news media articles a common theme amongst these collisions is that the driver of a large vehicle does not see the pedestrian due to the various blind spots existing around the vehicles. This is commonly observed when a large vehicle is making a turn. Often the mirrors that are installed to help a driver see objects around them are the sources of obstruction from seeing objects behind them. It is important that these mirrors be replaced by object sensors that exist on many modern light duty vehicles whereby pedestrians can be detected and automatic emergency braking (AEB) can be applied.
Other Pedestrian Impact Scenarios
While the causes of serious pedestrian collisions are various there are several that have repeated themselves in the news media articles.
On several occasions, often on high-speed expressways, a pedestrian has been struck after an initial impact where the driver exits their vehicle. In these instances persons do not recognize their danger. It has been commonly advised that occupants of a vehicle should stay in their vehicle after a minor impact however that is not always the best advice. A stopped vehicle within the lane of a high speed expressway can be struck. So it is advisable to discuss such complications. Pedestrians can exit their vehicle and travel to a location where they are less likely to be struck but this requires some understanding of the issues. Unfortunately no one in an official capacity has provided such important instruction to the public.
In some instances pedestrians have been struck while inside a bus shelter or simply standing on a sidewalk at an intersection. Again this requires some education about being vigilant when near motor vehicle traffic. The construction of bus shelters could be made more vigorous to reduce incidents of a vehicle plowing through the shelter however this is difficult to achieve especially when a wayward vehicle is of a higher mass.
In several instances pedestrians have been struck in urban parking lots. Visibility problems are a common factor. Due to their shorter height children are especially vulnerable and mothers pushing/pulling various carriages or wagons put their children at risk. Again, object proximity sensors in modern light-duty vehicles could be a great benefit as this modern technology becomes more prevalent.
Like cyclists, pedestrians can do much to increase their level of safety by wearing clothing that is reflective. Unfortunately there is a segment of cyclists and pedestrians who scoff at this idea while blaming motor vehicle drivers after they have been struck. More education is needed in this area.
Summary
There are opportunities to prevent many collisions but these are being wasted through inefficient bureaucracy. Attempts to change our societal thinking can sometimes be akin to using a row-boat paddle to turn around an ocean-liner. Many who are employed in some official capacity believe that the way it was always done is the way it should always be.
A primary problem resulting from this is that knowledge about how collisions occur, and why they occur, is a financial commodity, like pork bellies on a futures market. Those who are being killed and injured are often not in a financial position to gather the evidence needed to understand how they can avoid their tragedies. And those holding that critical information hold their cards close to their chests as if playing some kind of crazed poker game. Pedestrians are often at the bottom of the socio-economical scale and many must move through our transportation systems by walking, sometimes in very dangerous environments. While we may not be able to create pedestrian-safe systems at every location, much more can be done with expanding transparency through a public release of data held by many official organizations such as police, hospitals and governments. Until this transparency is dramatically increased we will continue to comment that Vision Zero is often Zero Vision.
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