With the warp speed of vast quantities of information passing through the public’s day it becomes difficult to detect a bit of information that is important and even more difficult for the public to perceive that importance. This fact is very real with respect to information involving collisions on our transportation systems.
Each day information about the latest collisions has to compete with an enticing focus on sports figures or movie stars by official media who are interested in stealing the public’s attention from another media competitor. Half-truths (or half lies) become strong magnets pulling the public toward some preconceived viewpoints that are often not based on reality, but based on what the public wants to hear/read/see.
In this realm information about the causes of important transportation collisions become hidden, sometimes purposely, or the information becomes misrepresented, sometimes purposely.
An example of this is exhibited in a collision that reportedly occurred in Toronto, Ontario in the early morning of November 28, 2025 on Hwy 427 near Rathburn Road. It was reported that a single vehicle struck a guardrail and the alone driver sustained “life-threatening” injuries. This injury information was later down-graded to “life-altering” injuries. There are several problems with these descriptions.
Firstly, the reason why guardrails exist is so that they reduce the severity of collisions and therefore reduce the severity of their consequences. When a guardrail is struck we cannot expect every unpredictable collision to be altered in a perfect manner. Roadways are designed and vehicles are manufactured to reduce the consequences of a large percentage of guardrail collisions. But sometimes something happens that did not go according to plan. And when something unexpected happens it needs to be identified so something can be adjusted to prevent, or reduce, the consequences of the next, future, mishap.
The word “identified” cannot be used narrowly in the sense that identification is made by a very few officials and no one else needs to know. That should be recognized as an obvious recipe for disaster. Because we ought to know that persons placed in a position of power and responsibility will want to hide from that accountability, universally, not just in transportation incidents. In a properly functioning society checks need to exist to minimize the chances that persons with responsibility for something are not able to hide their responsibility. Otherwise something dangerous can continue to exist, becomes uncorrected, and another tragedy occurs because that danger did not become identified and was not corrected. This reasoning should not be difficult to comprehend.
So why did the driver in the present collision sustain unexpectedly serious, or life altering, injuries after the impact of a guardrail? We do not want to single out the CP24 News article as it is just standard for how matters are reported generally across Ontario. But we see the following segment from the article where the investigating officer is interviewed by the CP24 News reporter:
“So right now, we’re dealing with a motor vehicle collision. It’s just a single motor vehicle collision. So that’s one vehicle,” said OPP Const. Taylor Konkle. “What happened? It was traveling southbound in the Express at approximately four o’clock in the morning, and it struck the left side guardrail.”
And that’s it. No further information. Nothing about why or how the vehicle hit the guardrail. Nothing about how the driver managed to sustain those serious injuries. But we know from many pervious collisions that guardrails can be too low and this can alter the way a vehicle strikes it. Also the guardrail may not have been maintained properly such that certain bolts, brackets or previous damage could have altered the way the system performed. And it is also not uncommon for an impact to be reported as a guardrail impact whereas the impact could actually be with the beginning of the rail, or the guardrail “terminal” or some other energy attenuating device. But no photos were provided of the collision scene so no one can be certain what happened.
A second issue relates to the manner in which injury information is purposely kept secret, thus preventing the general public from knowing how they might be exposed to a similar, sometimes fatal, fate. Using vague terminology such as “life-threatening ” or “life-altering” prevents anyone from hypothesizing how an injury might have occurred and whether the injury outcome could be acceptable or not.
Injury outcomes from real-life collisions have been scientifically documented and studied for decades by North American agencies such as NHTSA and Transport Canada. Thus, if someone is given a reasonably precise description of a certain collision the expected injuries can be known. NHTSA, for example, has stored the results of over 139,000 collision analyses in their NASS database since 1979. The NASS program has recently been replaced by the CISS program which provides similar collision summaries. So given a scenario where a light-duty vehicle strikes a guardrail, databases such as NASS or CISS provide the specific injuries that occurred in those real-life collisions.
Comparing those injuries in the NASS-CISS collisions to the one involving the present collision one can confirm if something occurred that was unusual and unacceptable. But without a proper description of the collision or a proper injury description such a comparison cannot be made. This is a failure in the way we operate in the Province of Ontario.
Officials with the obligation to explain why a collision occurred, and why an injury or death occurred, have developed policies citing privacy legislation so that they do not have to be accountable to the public. Secrecy and misinformation are the basis on which many future collisions are caused because we fail to identify and correct the causes of the collisions of the present. There are examples of societies in other parts of the world that operate in short-sighted benefit for the few in detriment to their societies as a whole. We have an opportunity to understand and act so accountability does not become some theoretical concept, but that it is a true reality.
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