Eighteen months ago, I gingerly changed lanes in heavy traffic on a rainy night. After nearly completing entry, I found an express transit bus of the Toronto Transit Commission scraping my driver's side. I remember my terror; I don't remember the impact to my front wheel well. I do remember the bus rolling a little ahead of me, on a diagonal. It's rear end was still in the left turn lane.
A reconstruction of the events revealed this: the bus travelled down the left-turn lane, presumably to avoid traffic, until another car ahead, which was using the left-turn lane as it was designed, forced the bus into the centre lane, where my car had almost completed entry.
Although the forty-foot bus still had its rear end in the left-turn lane, the police chose to view the scene according to the revisionist story from the bus driver. So much so that when I mentioned to Officer Ashley Wolosinowsky that the bus was going down the left-turn lane, she countered with sarcasm ("Oh, really?") before charging me with careless driving ("You're at fault!").
Say what?
The terror of almost losing my life to an express bus that did something it should not have done, was compounded by the horror of questionable behaviour from the police. That double-whammy caused me to suffer cognitive difficulties for well over a year. A few issues remain.
But there was a silver lining to the fiasco. In the five hours that it took the reporting police to arrive at the scene, I gained time and the mental wherewithall to realize that I had my camera equipment with me. I photographed some incrimminating evidence, not by design -- I wasn't thinking straight -- but by coincidence. Without those photographs, now well presented for the judge, I doubt that I would stand much of a chance, just with my diagram of the positioning of vehicles after impact. For it would be my word against the police diagram, which indicated that (a) the bus was never in the left-turn lane, but rather in the centre lane, and (b) I was the one driving on a diagonal towards the bus. According to the police, I was the one that hit the bus, and not the other way around. Oh, really?
The fairy tale by the bus driver, in cahoots with the police, has an expiry date in court. This assumes that no other shenanigans take place, tomorrow, on the day of my traffic trial.
The motto for the Toronto police is "to serve and protect." And for the most part, I think it is an honourable force that does just that. But I wonder: Do police get commissions from certain segments whom they protect more than others? Say, the bus driver's union, which has a vested interest in keeping their insurance rates down? Just wondering.
