Trial or trail? City of Toronto apologizes for misspelled bike path signs

Are you on a trail or on trial? That’s the question some Toronto residents were asking after noticing a typo on a bike path sign in the east end of Toronto.

The word trail in “Lake Shore Trail” was misspelled as trial on the sign. John Oughton, a retired Centennial College English professor, was one of the people to notice the typo and call attention to it.

“I noticed it two weeks ago. That’s when I posted the thing on Facebook, and it just sort of trickled into the media awareness in the last couple of days,” said Oughton.

And it’s not the first one he’s seen.

“I’m on a Facebook group called Weird Toronto and a few weeks ago, somebody posted another typo that occurred around the Danforth and these signs are for bike paths,” explained Oughton. “So that was the first one, but I wasn’t expecting to see this.”

“We think of them as being so official … and checked by numerous people,” he added.

The City said three of the cycling wayfinding signs were misspelled and two of three have been replaced, with the third being corrected Thursday. The signs are among 500 that were installed in December.

Oughton said while the typo is funny, the impact might not be as humourous.

“It’s weird spending money on it … Somebody’s got to fix the mistake, and money did go into making the original sign,” he points out.

City staff said the associated costs for “rectification” are insignificant and they rarely happen in the City’s comprehensive signage network.

“The City apologizes for the oversight that led to the misspelled signs. This was a result of a human error in the proofreading process. We are actively reviewing and reinforcing our internal protocols to ensure a more robust system is in place to catch such errors before signs are installed,” read a statement to CityNews.