Road Safety Programs

Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement (CVSE) has announced the availability of an updated version of the Carrier Safety Guide.

The City of Surrey has released a year in review report for 2019 detailing it's accomplishments in meeting Vision Zero commitments. The City’s goal is an achievable and measurable shorter-term target: to reverse the trend of rising injuries and deaths on Surrey’s roads and achieve a minimum 15% reduction in injury collisions over the next five years (2019-2023).

Here's a relatively short document from the International Transport Forum outlining seven case studies in four areas:

While this video is a genuine antique, it is still valid today. In fact, the company itself is still "the world's leading crash-avoidance training company according to their web site. The company focus today is on commercial vehicles but the system applies equally to and driver.

Here is an important question for you as an employer: Do you know why it is important for you to know what driving skills and behaviours your employees have? The short answer is that you have a legal duty to insure that your employees are qualified to carry out their assigned driving tasks.

Parachute Canada has released the eighth in a series of publications titled "Vision Zero Canadian Landscape 2.0: Successes and Opportunities." Pages 11 to 18 outline B.C.'s approach to Vision Zero and contains an interview with Colleen Hildebrandt, Outreach Manager, Road Safety Strategy, Policy & Strategic Initiatives Branch, RoadSafetyBC and Erin Anderson, Senior Manager, Road Safety Strategy and Stakeholder Relations, RoadSafetyBC.

According to Road Safety at Work every year, on average, 19 workers are killed and 1,319 are injured and miss time from work due to motor vehicle crashes. Vehicles used for work are considered to be part of the workplace regardless of who owns the vehicle. This means that both the employer and the employee have a responsibility to be safe.

We hear a lot about the Safe Systems Approach required by Vision Zero. An article in Transportation Talk, the newsletter of the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers by Neil Arason explains:

Oceanside Community Safety is a group of volunteers that want to make a difference. Their Traffic Watch program is an expansion of Speedwatch that now includes Cell Watch and Intersection Watch. Intersection Watch volunteers observe drivers at an intersection to check compliance with traffic laws and remind drivers of their obligations. The data collected is shared with the RCMP, ICBC and the public.

The Victoria Transport Policy Institute has released a document that recognizes the long term decline in traffic casualty rates is ending. According to the document's introduction "Crash rates have started to increase, indicating that current traffic safety strategies have fulfilled their potential. To achieve ambitious safety goals such as Road to Zero we need additional traffic safety strategies. This will require a paradigm shift, a change in the way traffic risks are measured and potential safety strategies are evaluated."