The Luminous Veil

The Prince Edward Viaduct is covered elsewhere on this site for its 1918 construction. This is about what was added to it eighty-five years later: the Luminous Veil, a barrier of vertical stainless-steel rods running along both sides of the bridge deck, installed in 2003 to stop the viaduct's use as a suicide site. Before the barrier went up, the bridge had, by public health estimates cited at the time, one of the highest suicide tolls of any bridge in North America outside the Golden Gate Bridge.

A design competition, not just a fence

Rather than a standard chain-link suicide fence, the city ran a public design competition for the barrier, won by architect Dereck Revington, whose design used thousands of closely spaced steel rods angled to catch and refract light, reading as public art from a distance and functioning as an unclimbable barrier up close. A widely cited 2010 study in the BMJ by researchers Mark Sinyor and Anthony Levitt found that deaths from jumping at the viaduct dropped essentially to zero after 2003, without a corresponding rise at other Toronto bridges — making the Veil a frequently cited real-world example in public health research on restricting access to lethal means.

Sources

• Sinyor & Levitt — BMJ 2010, natural experiment on the Bloor Viaduct barrier
• Wikipedia — Prince Edward Viaduct