In June I attended the CARSP/Parachute Canada “Vision Zero” road safety conference. Road safety covers many facets, more than you realise sometimes, from impaired driving to road designs and from drivers education to child seats. Here are some more observations from the conference.
Vision Zero
You may have heard of Vision Zero if you are into road safety advocacy. If you haven’t, Vision Zero has become a bit of a buzzword from Sweden, that stands for the idea to aim for zero severe injuries and roads deaths. A noble pursuit, but the reality is stubborn.
The idea behind Vision Zero is that road infrastructure should be designed that if a road user makes a mistake, it should not cause any serious harm.
Not everyone signing on to Vision Zero
Some cities don’t sign on to Vision Zero. Ottawa hasn’t. Cities may not believe in it, don’t want to spend extra money on traffic safety or they don’t want to commit to a time line towards zero. Others may not commit to the slogan, but work on traffic safety anyway. I believe that has been Ottawa’s position.
Swedes didn’t like roundabouts
On the second day of the road safety conference, Swedish Stefan Jonsson, Head of Road Safety Unit at the Swedish Transport Administration, talked about Vision Zero. The Swedes want to increase cycling by 100% by 2030 but that requires investments, else there will be 75% more severely injured cyclists (2000 severely injured cyclists annually lately).
Stefan took a walk in Ottawa and added some slides to his presentation. He showed an image of a 40 km/h sign on a wide road in Ottawa and commented that a sign alone may not do much. He criticized 50 km/h in residential neighbourhoods, sharrows and flexiposts along bike lanes. He wondered why we keep building large intersections rather than roundabouts. In this context Mr. Jonsson mentioned that Swedes didn’t like roundabouts when they were introduced 30 years ago.
An hour glass on my road!
In order to stop drivers from passing busses when people get on and off the bus, the Swedes designed a so called ‘hour glass’ bus stop. I have seen those in Sweden and really liked the concept.
Interestingly he also mentioned that “Vision Zero doesn’t care about fender bender collisions, but about severe and deadly collisions“, acknowledging perhaps that Vision Zero doesn’t solve all the traffic problems in the world, but want to ensure no one dies or suffers life altering trauma after a collision.
Montreal builds Express Bike Routes
Montreal speaker Stephanie Benoit, urban planner at the City of Montreal, added that Montreal has a requirement that all city owned trucks need to have side guards to prevent pedestrians and cyclists to be pulled underneath a truck in a collision. They also require blind spot warnings on city trucks. In Ottawa, you have likely seen those large green decals on trucks and buses, asking you to stay behind the vehicle and not squeeze next to it so you won’t get crushed if you are in a driver’s blind spot. Montreal is also implementing an express bike network, which presumably is safer.
Edmonton’s Safety over Convenience
Edmonton’s Christie Pelletier, Director of Safety Mobility with a Master of Science in Kinesiology, shared that speed reduction signs alone don’t make people comply with speed limits, as we know all too well from the tens of thousands of speeding tickets the City of Ottawa is currently handing out. Christie also mentioned some principles Edmonton aims to adhere to:
- Safety over convenience
- Consistency matters
- Systematic approach
Tens of Thousands of Tickets
If you read this, you likely think: “well duh“. But sadly, politics and budgets are in the way, although I believe things are changing in Ottawa. The city is building more protected bike infrastructure, modified several rural intersections and builds protected intersections.
Unfortunately, at the same time, we also keep widening roads and intersections, which as everyone knows, is a temporary solution as new roads attracts drivers like flies to honey.
It took a while until speed cameras were accepted and some people still believe it is “not fair that cameras are activated outside school hours” 😭. By the way, the money from speeding tickets is going back into road safety and not in the general tax coffers as some people state on social media.
“New statistics show Ottawa’s 40 photo radar cameras issued 37,285 speeding tickets in April, after issuing 43,416 tickets in March. So far in 2024, 121,652 speeding tickets have been issued by the photo radar cameras.” Josh Pringle – CTV News May 30, 2024
We have to remember though that cameras are not a structural solution but more of a band aid. As a city and as a police force, you don’t want to ticket people, you want them to comply.
Training starts early but doesn’t reach many children
There are many organisations in Canada dedicated to safety on the road. But I also learned at the conference that safe walk and cycle training only reaches 2% of the children. The Ottawa Safety Council during the Covid years had to completely switch their delivery model from in-class learning to on line learning. With their new model they reached more than 13000 kids and 681 teachers with scores going up from a pre-quiz average score of 68% to 92% for a post-quiz average score (Spring 2024 numbers). The data is captured electronically.
“Unfortunately, a score is one thing, but it turns out that the rules learned are not applied in real life“, as one presenter stated at the conference.
“Road safety is simply not cool”
There are other issues though: connecting with youth is harder than ever. “Road safety is simply not cool” someone mentioned. “But other routes for reaching out are, such as……the environment”. (Greta Thunberg effect?).
Approaching road safety through an environmental lens is apparently a better route. Who would have thought? Ironically, past research showed that people don’t mostly bike for environmental reasons, (despite being painted as green folks) but for ease of getting somewhere, exercise, fresh air, high cost of operating a car. While environmental considerations are a bonus, they are not the prime reason by far for cycling. Side note: I also learned that ‘teens’ is out and ‘youth’ is in. Another tip: use a “talking head” in educational videos, those fast edited, close up faces in social media, talking a mile a minute. I personally detest them, but I am not the target group.
A strong case for infrastructure and Vision Zero
Vision Zero really hammers on safe infrastructure, which I strongly believes in too, based on what I have seen in the Netherlands, where I grew up and go back regularly. I do see that Canada is learning from other countries too, but at the same time, here in Ottawa it took a very long time before the provincial MTO finally agreed on safer walking and cycling infrastructure across highway 417 that cuts through the city. And only after councillor Tierney and major Sutcliffe wrote a letter urging for more safety by creating more walking and cycling permeability through the Queensway, our “Berlin Wall” through Ottawa.
We keep building very large intersections and widen roads (read: speeding), controlled by traffic signal software that in my opinion is not keeping up with the times. I can wait 90 seconds on Prince of Wales at Dynes with hardly a car in sight for example, potentially encouraging cycling or walking through red.
The software exists that can detect that “there is someone waiting at point A, and no one drives in lane B, so why don’t I switch to red for lane B and give point A a green in 5 seconds instead of waiting 75 seconds.” Or, “there is a number of pedestrians waiting at point C, but I only detect one driver waiting in lanes A, B and C, so I let that driver wait a bit longer and get the pedestrians through first“. Yes, that software exists and makes traffic flow much better.
Vision Zero examples are out there
There is much we can do and the examples are out there. From safer bike infrastructure to replacing intersections with roundabouts and pedestrian tunnels. We can create two step crossings for our elderly, we can create safe cycling crossings and wider sidewalks. Ottawa has built quite a number of protected intersections already. We can change traffic signal software. It is all about choices and it takes strong leadership who has to be able to explain why we have to make changes in our mobility systems.
Road deaths and injured up
Since 2020 road safety deaths in Canada have gone up from 1711 to 1931 in 2022, that is 220 more and a worrying increasing trend of nearly 12.8% more. In that same period, the seriously injured went up from 7868 to 8851, an increase in two years of 983 seriously injured persons, or 12.5%. I learned at the conference that that a similar upwards trend is happening in Sweden and Winnipeg.
A USA stat: More than 42,000 people die in traffic every year in the US, that is 800 a week or the equivalent of 3 airliners every week. That doesn’t include the severely injured people. Yet, we shrug our shoulders.
Saving 30 people from death and injuries daily
Adding those two numbers together, 10,782 people died or had serious injuries in Canada in 2022, or 30 people every single day of the year. That is what Vision Zero is targeting. Saving 30 people a day from death and serious injuries in Canada sounds like a worthy cause to look into. I admit, after reading those numbers I dislike being on the road even more.
Changing behaviour is not easy, especially with road safety not being a cool topic and not being able to reach vast numbers of people. And if you reach them, the knowledge is not always applied in real life. Vison Zero therefore is grounded in the belief that people make mistakes in traffic, but road design should prevent them from making fatal mistakes.
Thank you CARSP, Parachute Canada and DesJardins for supporting me to attend the conference and let me do a walkshop on Wellington Street.
I wrote another conference post about how seniors in Ontario actually die in traffic. It often happens near their home when out for an errand or a stroll. More here.
Post Script
I am currently reading a super interesting book about global logistics, called “Door-to-door” by Pulitzer price winner Edward Humes. He mentions for example that people think they can multi task while driving, but we can’t. We can switch quickly between tasks, but not do them at the same time. Such as working a flat screen while driving in busy traffic.
It is a great read about how we ended up with the transportation systems we have now, tied into global outsourcing, shipping (apparently bunker fuel for container ships is the lowest diesel grade possible and when cold, you can walk on it) and planning. It could have had a bit better editing and I don’t find all the chapters are tying well into each other, but still a great read with lots of data. Available at the library too.
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When we were in Portugal last year we were intrigued by one if the ways they addressed speeding. They had traffic lights that were triggered to go red if you were speeding. Once you stopped it then immediately turned green. Oncoming traffic was not affected unless they, too were speeding. It served to keep us within the speed limit if we wanted to avoid stopping. A great idea! Of course the light could be triggered by pedestrians wanting to cross the road.
We experienced the same thing last year