Bill Van Beers can’t help but be extra vigilant as he sees drivers speed by his home on Adelaide Street in central London.
His house is one of at least 50 buildings hit by vehicles in 2025—a number so high, safety advocates call it shocking.
“Shocking. Shocking that the number is actually 50,” said Angelo DiCicco, who heads the Ontario Safety League. “I would have expected at least five, but 50 is a huge amount.”
Numbers obtained through a freedom of information request to London police revealed that 47 vehicles crashed into buildings in each of the years 2023 and 2024.
In the first ten months of 2025, that number was 50. Averaged out, that’s five cars driving into buildings every single month in London.
“In my experience, it turns out to be simple errors that result in those types of crashes, which many people shake their heads at,” DiCicco said. His non-profit delivers safety training to communities and professional drivers to reduce preventable deaths and injuries in the province.
The crash outside Van Beers’ home on Oct. 5 destroyed the front porch.
“I heard a loud bang,” said Van Beers, “I saw one of the hydro wires swinging and I thought they had just hit a hydro pole. I didn’t realize they had hit the house and did as much damage as they did.”
A driver was faces charges for impaired driving, impaired driving exceeding blood drug concentration and taking a motor vehicle without consent, police told CBC News.
Several months after the incident, Van Beers is keeping a close watch on drivers outside his home as he arranges for repairs.
“Everybody is always speeding by,” he said. “I see a lot of distracted drivers. You can see there’s quite a few people on their phones, texting, doing whatever. It’s definitely a problem.”
There is no one reason London drivers crash into buildings, said London police Acting Sgt. Greg Pearson with the road safety section. Impaired driving, navigation failure, and pedal confusion have all been found to be culprits, he said.
“Ultimately, we would like to see zero [crashes into buildings],” said Pearson. “I think that’s the goal for all police services in the country. But getting there is going to be difficult.”
Instances of pedal or gearing confusion are less likely to result in serious injuries for the driver, said Pearson, due to lower speeds and rates of momentum in many of those cases. There is, however, always a heightened risk to unsuspecting pedestrians and occupants inside the buildings.
A major pedal-confusion case Londoners may recall happened in 2014, when a woman hit the gas instead of the brakes outside a London Costco, driving into a family and killing a six-year-old child and seriously injuring her mother, who was pregnant. The unborn child also died.
Pedal confusion often happens due to inattention and being distracted, said DiCicco. It’s also possible that newer drivers haven’t had the same amount of experience going into their tests since the COVID-19 pandemic, he added. They may have bypassed professional driver training altogether, and not have developed their low-speed maneuvering skills before getting their licence, DiCicco said.
Professional drivers should be retested every three to five years, he said, while others should self-test, re-evaluate their cognitive and mechanical abilities to safely operate an automobile at least every 10 years.
“The reality is that distraction is the No. 1 leading cause of incidents that we see here at the Ontario Safety League,” said DiCicco. “Multi-tasking is a lie.”
In Waterloo Region, 63 vehicles crashed into buildings in 2024. In 2025, there were 67 such crashes, Waterloo Regional Police Service said.
