Pedestrians

Question: What I would like to know who and how to petition to get better speed signage or to have an intersection evaluated for safety. Please respond to my query as I would like to campaign to make a change at an intersection near my home before the 'near misses' that happen there regularly become more serious.

I was hit by a car today in Ladysmith. I was walking my dog on the sidewalk a car drove out of the drive thru , did not look and hit me hard enough to knock me a few feet to the ground. I call the rcmp. No charges for the driver. I seemed to be at fault. Please explain

A lot can happen in just the 23 seconds of this video contributed by Orang Gila, taken in Maple Ridge, just past the Safeway at Dewdney Trunk Road. Keep an eye out for the pedestrian on the right sidewalk mid-block who is clearly dithering about crossing the street and is having difficulty finding a large enough gap in the four lanes of traffic that she must cross on the busy street.

I was walking with a friend on a relatively busy road. We were walking in the white painted sidewalk portion facing traffic, so heading East towards Memorial. We were engaged in a conversation and didn’t hear the garbage truck approaching in the other lane (the right hand lane heading East) as garbage trucks do, he stopped to pick up garbage.

Recently the Comox Valley Regional District purchased some land – the former railway grade from Royston to Cumberland. It has been used as an unofficial trail in the past, however I wasn’t aware of it. The trail is approximately 5.5 km long. However, part of this trail is on the Cumberland side of the Inland Island Hwy.

Question: Last week on my daily walk, my friend and I were crossing the old Island Highway at the bottom of Bay Street. It looked like we had a lot of time but oddly a younger aggressive driver actually sped up as we were crossing. It was no where a near miss (or hit depending on perspective) but it made me question that there are no crosswalks for close to a kilometre.

A reader observes "I was crossing West Mall at UBC over a speed hump towards the bus stop. A car was driving on West Mall and did not stop. When I showed the driver the white arrows on the pavement, he said that these were speed hump marks, not a crosswalk. I recognize that I might have been wrong assuming it was a pedestrian crosswalk, but then I started thinking, who should have the right of way?"

Over the five years ending with 2012 B.C. saw an average of 2,300 pedestrian involved collisions with 2,400 injuries and 60 fatalities. Almost 42% of these were aged 61 or over. Males tend to be involved more often with 35 deaths each year compared to 25 female deaths.

Older pedestrians are less likely to survive a collision than younger people. It is also a fact of life that aging brings with it a reduction in perceptual abilities such as poorer vision, depth perception and increased chance of confusion. Add bad walking habits to the mix and an already risky situation becomes worse. All of the things that we teach our children to survive in traffic are equally applicable to older pedestrians.