Road Safety Programs

Does your community have a road safety plan? If if does, your local government is probably ahead of most. If it doesn't, you should be asking your elected representatives why this is the case. After all, you are more likely to suffer financial loss, injury or death from a traffic related incident than you are from all other criminal actions combined.

Every year in Canada, drivers kill 16 child pedestrians and 5 child cyclists. They also injure 1,300 and 700 respectively. Sadly most of these incidents are preventable and we can do things to make it safer for children to walk or ride a bicycle in our community.

BC's Occupation Health and Safety Regulation imposes duties on employers whose employees drive either their own or a company owned vehicle for work. Road Safety at Work has published an Employers' Guide to Road Safety Requirments to assist employers in fulfilling those duties.

RoadSafetyBC secured funding of $612,000 from Transport Canada's Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program for the BC Road Safety Revitalization Project. The project addresses address current and emerging road safety issues across the province, with wide-ranging and varied delivery locations.

Crowdsourcing is where an organization obtains ideas from a large, relatively open and often rapidly evolving group of participants. An example of how this can be applied to road safety is found in the Spring 2021 edition of Transportation Talk, a publication of the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers.

We are becoming more and more aware that our streets have been designed for motor vehicles and they are not prepared to accommodate cycle and pedestrian traffic safely. If we approach municipal authorities, their engineers point to the TAC Geometric Design Guide for Canadian Roads and refuse to budge from what it contains.

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs seek to increase the number of students who use active transportation (walking & cycling) methods to travel to and from school. Increasing physical activity has the potential to improve health. SRTS programs aim to accomplish this goal through engineering, education, enforcement, encouragement, equity, and evaluation.

BikeMaps.org is a crowd sourced map of cycling collision data worldwide. Incidents of collisions, near misses, hazards and thefts can be entered via the web site or through the free Android or Apple apps. The data collected is available to all. If you choose to register and log in, it will even alert you to recent incidents mapped in your area.

This is a video from SAAQ in Quebec produced for a speed and distracted driving awareness campaign in 2020. The speed display in the video is showing real time traffic speeds from a pole mounted radar unit at the filming location. It's a striking visual reminder of how fast we often drive through a school zone.

Here's an interesting idea. Getting cars off the roads should also be part of Vision Zero. Perhaps even being included as a 6th pillar of the strategy. This article in StreetsBlogUSA made that suggestion.