Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Society

Vulnerable Road Users and Where the Rubber Meets the Road

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The Toronto Star and its reporters are to be commended for talking about what others have ignored for so long-the tremendous grief, carnage and cost to families, friends, the insurance corporation and the health system caused by  pedestrians and cyclists being maimed and killed by vehicles-it was called road violence at the start of the twentieth century, and that term is returning to use now.

I have been writing about the awful year that the City of Toronto has had with over 40 deaths and hundreds of severe injuries. We like to think that in Vancouver we have this under control, with our well thought out transportation hierarchy that gives pedestrians the first priority. Those triangle graphs are lovely,but as a Price Tags commenter noted yesterday, there’s a real gap between what we say and what we do in Vancouver. While I am concentrating on the road violence in Toronto because there is a true will to do something about it, it should be noted that Vancouver’s pedestrian deaths, at over one person being killed  a month is per capita  twice the rate of Toronto’s. Where is the reaction?

Road safety or the lack of it is being recognized as a major public health problem. Our own Provincial Medical Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall identified road violence as a major cause of fatalities and serious injuries in his report Where the Rubber Meets the Road released this spring. Dr. Kendall notes that 280 people die and another 79,000 people are injured on roads in British Columbia every year. Vulnerable road users (those people without the protection of an enclosed vehicle) make up 45.7 per cent of serious injuries in 2011. Vulnerable road users were also 31.7 per cent of fatalities in 2009 and that increased to 34.9 per cent in 2013.

In Toronto, City staff are now perceiving road safety as a major public health problem, where 1500 pedestrian and 950 cyclist collisions with vehicles have been reported to October 30. There is a 20.7 per cent hike in pedestrian injuries being treated at Toronto’s main trauma centre. That is not acceptable.

“Ward Vanlaar, chief operating officer of the Traffic Injury Research Foundation in Ottawa, said until the last decade or so, road safety was thought of as a transportation issue. “The take on it was that we have a price to pay for mobility, and the price is that certain people will die and that was considered to be acceptable,” he said. Vanlaar said that in recent years he’s seen a shift in thinking about traffic safety, both globally and across Canada. “People working in this field, and also in other health-related fields have had this epiphany almost, like ‘Hey, there are really a lot of people dying,’” he said.

There is a major change in seeing safety being more important than mobility, and having that applied to vulnerable road users too. If humans make mistakes that can cost human lives, then a transportation system needs to be designed to” mitigate those risks and basically eliminate those instances where, because of human error, people will die.”

Monica Campbell, a spokesperson for Toronto Public Health, said traffic safety falls within the realm of her department.“If you invest in safer roads, safer streets, better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians – does that reduce the burden on the healthcare system? Absolutely it does,” she said.

So there you have it-traffic safety and the safety of vulnerable road users is a public health priority at the municipal level in Toronto and in British Columbia at the Provincial level. Now we just need to start designing our streets as if every users’ life truly does matter. It is the difference between injury, life and death.

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Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Walking for Wellbeing, Well-Being

That City Walk Can Kill You in the Pedestrian Death Capital of Canada

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The statistics have just been released that there were 11 murders in the City of Vancouver in 2016.  The 11 murders did not include the 11 pedestrians who died by being crashed into by vehicles on city streets. And some sobering statistics for  Metro Vancouver-“the coroners’ research found that 40 per cent of pedestrians killed in Greater Vancouver were struck at intersections and in crosswalks. Of those killed in crosswalks, two-thirds were crossing while the light was green”.

Concerned citizens nationally note that somehow we view the death of walkers  by cars as an inevitable side effect of motordom, an unavoidable collateral to the convenience of the car. Indeed one of the rationales for driverless vehicle technology is that less pedestrians will be maimed and die.

Torontonians call this carnage “road violence”, a term first used when the car started to take over public streets in the early part of the 20th century. Earlier in that century cars in Paris were even regulated to only go the speed of a walker, to ensure that pedestrians had a chance. Vancouver pedestrians are dying by vehicle crashes at twice the rate per capita of Toronto, where one person is injured every four hours, and over 44 pedestrians were killed in 2016. But in Vancouver there is not the outrage, not the insistence that we look clearly at the four items that can ameliorate this awful paradigm-visibility, driver behaviour, speed and road design. We don’t have a  city councillor or mayor  that is taking this task on, and many people deride the obvious statement that reflectivity is very important for pedestrians in our low light winters. Wearing reflective items markedly decreased pedestrian deaths in Scandinavia.

We need political will to change driver behaviour, speed,and road design in Vancouver. Visibility? Pedestrians can assist with this piece. Noted journalist Daphne Bramham has written in the Vancouver Sun that  “At least half a dozen times since the rains have come, I’ve been startled by pedestrians — dressed all in black — darting across the street in the middle of the block or against a red light…Sure, it’s fashionable and comfortable to wear black. But it’s also bloody risky, especially on dark, rainy Vancouver nights.

“There is data showing that Vancouver (closely followed by Surrey) is the pedestrian death capital of Canada. During this past, bleak, rainy October, twice as many B.C. pedestrians died as were killed in the six previous years. Ten pedestrians died in five Lower Mainland communities, which brought the provincial death toll for 2016 to 47. Usually, January is usually the worst month. Data for 2010 to 2015 collected by the B.C. Coroners Service shows that, on average, 7.4 pedestrians die every January. In November, the average is 7.2, and in December, 6.3.”  And in Tsawwassen, one of those lower mainland communities, two seniors were mowed down and killed on 56th Street in two separate incidents. They were  in a marked crosswalked intersection killed  by cars making left turns.And in the Lower Mainland a disproportionate number of those killed by vehicle crashes are seniors.

Daphne also noted that “A good and caring friend gave me some reflective bands to wear. Yet even though I knew I was safer, I felt foolish wearing them”. That is the work that the Walk and Be Seen Project at Kitsilano Neighbourhood House is undertaking with seniors to change how pedestrians feel about using reflective items in our rainy winters.

Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) makes a universal reflective sash that can be used by anyone, and there are textiles, sprays and even reflective wool that can be knitted. We need to insist that winter clothes have reflectivity and are not all black as is the current style. Until we can change the paradigm with the car, being visible at night  is one thing that pedestrians can do, as well as contacting their Metro Vancouver Mayors and City Councillors and demanding that pedestrian safety be made a priority. It is a matter of life or death.

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Society, Walking for Wellbeing

Who Are Metro Vancouver’s Bill Cunninghams?

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Bill Cunningham who wrote for the New York Times died at 87 in 2016.  You may have seen his column-Bill went around New York City by bike and by foot and photographed fashion trends. But he was doing more than that-as The New York Times stated  he “ turned fashion photography into his own branch of cultural anthropology on the streets of New York, chronicling an era’s ever-changing social scene for The New York Times by training his busily observant lens on what people wore — stylishly, flamboyantly or just plain sensibly”. 

 

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In 2009 he was designated by the New York City Conservancy a  living landmark. There is also an excellent documentary on him called “Bill Cunningham New York.” He lived in a tiny apartment in the Carnegie Hall building. And if you saw him in his peasant jacket on a bicycle, you knew it was Bill.

 

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I think Foncie Pulice who took photos of Vancouverites from the 1930’s to 1979 was also a bit like Bill Cunningham, someone who was at ease with talking to people on the street and leaving a cultural gift of all those photographic memories. And until 2006 there was David Cohen, a music lover that went to every symphony concert he could and would always talk to anyone on Granville Mall about music, bus routes, life and living in Vancouver. David always carried books with him and was passionate about music. Bramwell Tovey the conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra played the piano for David at his hospice when he was dying. David Cohen was for me the epitome of a Vancouverite, approachable, kind and just plain friendly.

 

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Do we still have those characters in Vancouver that connect people through photography, music, or conversation on downtown city streets? If you know of one, please let us know in the comments below.

 

Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Walking for Wellbeing

New York responsible for Road Violence Injuries in Landmark Decision

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As reported in Streetsblog the State of New York’s Court of Appeals has made a landmark ruling that may have implications across the U.S.-“New York City and other municipalities can be held liable for failing to redesign streets with a history of traffic injuries and reckless driving.”

The ruling  arises from the consideration of a crash where a vehicle being driven over 50 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone crashed into a 12-year-old boy on a bicycle and the boy has been awarded 20 million dollars in damages. Here’s the interesting part –“The court held that departments of transportation (DOT) can be held liable for harm caused by speeding drivers, where the DOT fails to install traffic-calming measures even though it is aware of dangerous speeding, unless the DOT has specifically undertaken a study and determined that traffic calming is not required.”

It turns out that residents had asked the City several times to provide traffic calming measures on Gerritsen Street, which was locally known for speeding vehicles. DOT subsequently conducted studies at three intersections, according to court documents, and “notified police of the speeding problem after each study.” But DOT didn’t look at the incidence of speeding along Gerritsen Avenue as a whole, and failed to look at traffic calming measures to slow down vehicles.

The judge commented: It is  known among traffic engineers that straight, wide roads with little interference from pedestrians and other vehicles, such as Gerritsen Avenue, encourage speeding because drivers feel more comfortable on roadways with those characteristics…traffic calming measures deter speeding because they cause drivers to be more cautious, and that such measures are known to reduce the overall speed on roadways.” The upshot? The jury could conclude that “negligence was a proximate cause of the accident”.

Such a ruling will mean that city budgets will include funding for street safety redesigns, and  will mean that traffic safety improvements are no longer “subject to debate and contingent on unanimous local opinion.” It also means that in New York State  when traffic calming is recommended in studies  to reduce road violence,that the municipality is encumbered to install the infrastructure. This is truly a game changer.

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Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Walking for Wellbeing

That City Walk Can Kill You

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In January noted journalist Daphne Bramham wrote in the Vancouver Sun a very cogent article offering a  simple solution to pedestrians trying to navigate across streets in our low light and rainy winters-don’t wear black.  A lot of responders to her article bristled at the fact that Daphne was brave enough to state the obvious-vehicle operators often  cannot see pedestrians.

We live in a province where 280 people are killed annually and 79,000 people maimed in car crashes. This is a big number and serious enough that the Provincial Medical Officer wrote his yearly report on car crashes. What causes them? Dr. Perry Kendall surmised that speed (36%), distraction (29%) and impairment (20%) were largely responsible. Rates of crashes resulting in serious injuries have risen from 38 per cent in 2007 to 46 per cent in 2009.  Road design, distraction and speed are major contributors. I’d add visibility as well.

In October 2016, twice as many pedestrians died as were killed in the last six years. The Coroners Service of B.C. lists that from 2010 to  October 2016, 396 pedestrians were killed by vehicles in British Columbia. In B.C., Vancouver is the pedestrian death capital of Canada-it has more pedestrian deaths than any other city, and twice those of Toronto per capita. Sixteen per cent or 64 of those deaths were in Vancouver. Thirteen per cent or 50 deaths were in Surrey. Abbotsford, Richmond and Burnaby also had high percentages of pedestrians killed. Of those dying, 57 per cent were male. One third of those dying were 70 years or older. Forty per cent of pedestrian deaths happened at intersections in Metro Vancouver, with two-thirds crossing while the light was green.

But here is the statistic I found remarkable-61 per cent of all the pedestrians killed in British Columbia were over 50 years of age. That is a huge number and a worrying one. While we have focused our attention on road safety to school children, this suggests we also need to address the older part of the population who may not be as nimble or cognitively attune to the fact they are vulnerable. Of course there needs to be a sea change in driver behaviour and education, slower speeds, and municipalities that will redesign intersections to stop the carnage of their citizens. We as citizens also must get angry and insist that politicians pay attention to this  road violence needlessly yanking out lives.

In Finland every child going to school must wear three pieces of reflective items on their clothes and backpack. The safety reflector was developed in Finland in the 1960’s and it is the law that walkers wear reflective items in the dark. Wearing reflectors and reflective clothing is completely accepted as daily wear in Scandinavia which also has the lowest incidence of pedestrian accidents. A similar program in Great Britain reduced children’s pedestrian deaths by 51 per cent.
Studies show that reflectors increase the visibility of pedestrians from 25 meters to 140 meters, increasing the reaction time from 2 seconds to 10 seconds for a car being driven at 50 kilometers per hour. That’s eight seconds more for a driver to react, and a pedestrian to survive. We can’t pretend that this is not the wild west for road violence-it is, and in Metro Vancouver we are in the leaders of carnage in  Canada. Wearing reflective wear is quite simply the right thing to do, along with lobbying for slower speeds, more campaigns on driver behaviour, and redesigning street intersections as if walkers really mattered.

 

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Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians

New Zealand, Older Pedestrians and Road Safety

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An article in the New Zealand Herald  notes how diminished the pedestrian is for road space in that country.  Lynley Hood is a researcher in Dunedin who is losing her sight and has started a petition asking the government to reduce the number of pedestrians killed on New Zealand roads. In New Zealand pedestrians do not have priority over motor vehicles when crossing side roads and intersections.

Between 2006 and 2015 384 pedestrians were killed on New Zealand roads. Ninety cyclists were killed during the same time. Dr. Hood notes that the government “has more than $350 million invested in a Cycling Safety Action Plan. There is no pedestrian safety plan.” Thirty per cent of the pedestrians killed on the roads were 65 years and older. Ms. Hood notes that the 104 seniors in that 30 per cent of  pedestrians were more than the total of cyclists killed, but that no special funding was available to ameliorate the cause of this carnage.

Ms. Hood had little interest in her work except from New Zealand’s chief coroner. Since the senior population in New Zealand will double in the next two decades that means the pedestrian death rate could also double.

“Older people need to walk for exercise, Dr Hood said, and they have to cross roads. They are more unstable, move more slowly and are likely to have sight and hearing problems.When crossing a road they have no protection, and they are generally poorer judges of speed and distance. What’s needed is some commitment by Government to pedestrian safety. There are a lot of young traffic designers who would leap at the chance of tackling the challenge if Government put some money into it. We’re not all petrolheads.”

In New Zealand anything that is not a motorized vehicle uses the sidewalk including scooters, skateboards, mobility scooters and Segways as well as walkers. There is no set standard for width, design, surface or grade. In a country with a population size similar to British Columbia’s it is time for motordom to accept the right of all users, and to give pedestrians the priority for safe access across roads.mot_blames_victims

Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Walking for Wellbeing

Smart Growth USA and Dangerous By Design

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Smart Growth America has just released their 2016 edition of Dangerous By Design which examines the epidemic of pedestrians that are killed by cars. Imagine-in the United States between 2005 and 2014 over 46,000 people were killed by being struck by cars. That is the population of Cornwall Ontario or Brandon Manitoba.

Unlike the Canadian Automobile Association that has just released a study breathlessly listing the worst traffic bottlenecks inconveniencing drivers in Canada, Smart Growth USA gets it right-this is not about the inconvenience of vehicular traffic being throttled down by road capacity and so-called “waiting time lost” but about the fact that we are killing off innocent people, whose only crime was to be walking on a sidewalk or a street when their life was snuffed out. But no one is talking about the eleven Vancouver pedestrians that were killed on city streets, or the hundreds maimed, many legally walking  with the right of way when crossing in a marked intersection. We had 11 murders in the City of  Vancouver in 2016. Please double that number and recognize the people who were also snuffed out by road violence. Where’s the concerned commentary of the Mayor and Council? Per capita, pedestrians are dying at TWICE the rate of pedestrians in Toronto. And no one in authority is addressing this epidemic.

As Smart Growth America states:  “In 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, 4,884 people were killed by a car while walking—105 people more than in 2013. On average, 13 people were struck and killed by a car while walking every day in 2014. And between 2005 and 2014, Americans were 7.2 times more likely to die as a pedestrian than from a natural disaster. Each one of those people was a child, parent, friend, classmate, or neighbor. And these tragedies are occurring across the country—in small towns and big cities, in communities on the coast and in the heartland.”

Smart Growth America has a webinar yesterday to report their findings. They have partnered with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) as seniors are fifty per cent more likely than younger people to be hit and killed by a car while walking. People in lower income neighbourhoods and different ethnic backgrounds where also disproportionately at higher risk to be killed walking even after controlling for the relative higher walking rates associated in these communities.

Street design, speeding vehicles and poor pedestrian infrastructure also need to be addressed. British Columbia’s Medical Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall  notes that vulnerable road users-those without the enclosure of a steel vehicle-were 31.7 per cent of vehicle fatalities in 2009 and are now 34.9 per cent in 2013, the last year there are statistics.In total 280 people are killed annually in collisions in this province, with 79,000 people seriously injured. In a place where the government covers health care, you’d think our politicians would be advocating changes in driver education and behaviour, slower speeds, and road design that makes vehicles slow down. What is it going to take?

 

Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Society

“Seniors Safety Zones” Toronto’s Answer to Road Violence?

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Ben Spurr of the Toronto Star reports on the City of Toronto’s response to the fact that 37 of the 43 pedestrians killed in Toronto in 2016-a staggering 86 per cent-were seniors over 55 years.  Mayor John Tory stated: It was the deadliest year for pedestrians in more than a decade, and also the worst year for older pedestrian deaths over that time. We must do more to prevent these deaths and to protect residents across the city. The number of people killed on our roads, pedestrians, every year, should be zero.” 

That is great to hear as Toronto’s “Vision Zero” for pedestrian deaths originally meant a 20 per cent reduction in the next five years.  It seems that Toronto wasn’t aware of what Vision Zero meant-as stated by the Swedish Vision Zero Initiative, “The Vision Zero is the Swedish approach to road safety thinking. It can be summarized in one sentence: No loss of life is acceptable. The Vision Zero approach has proven highly successful. It is based on the simple fact that we are human and make mistakes. The road system needs to keep us moving. But it must also be designed to protect us at every turn.” 

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Road deaths in Stockholm  are now at low levels not seen since the 1950’s.

Toronto’s approach has been to create what they are calling “senior zones”on 12 intersections where seniors have been maimed and killed. Speed limits are being reduced  10  km/h to 40 km/h, “seniors safety signage” will tell drivers to slow down, pavement markings and longer pedestrian crossing times will be programmed. Red light cameras will also be installed.

Lowering the speed fractionally for a street as opposed to a slower speed for a larger area and not changing the design of the street to physically slow cars seem to be pretty conservative changes.The City is installing its first ever road safety program after a horrifying loss of life. Time will tell if the baby steps of signage and police regulation will be enough to mitigate the speed and driver behaviour killing and maiming older  walking Torontonians. Road design changes for visibility and slower speeds as well as  massive behavioural change for vehicle drivers may be  necessary. Here’s hoping their approach works.

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City rediscovers walking, Enhancing Safety for Pedestrians, Society

Making New York City’s Fifth Avenue into a Pedestrian Mall

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Dna info reports that the New York City Police Department is finding it challenging to have a President-elect living in New York City. “The massive NYPD presence around Trump Tower is costing the city millions of dollars, which has yet to be reimbursed by the federal government, to the alarm of Mayor Bill de Blasio and local elected officials.”

But Janette Sadik-Khan has an elegant solution which she shared with the New York Times. Donald Trump lives at Trump Tower at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, the same five lane Fifth Avenue “that joins the New York Public Library, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, as well as numerous cathedrals of commerce, tourism and high-end retail. Because the avenue is such a popular destination, retail floor space there rents for $3,000 per square foot a year, the highest price in the world, more than double the cost of similar space along the Champs Élysées. It seems appropriate that gold is a popular color for building facades on Fifth.”

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As people flow through this area of Fifth Avenue in their day-to-day activities, the street and sidewalk movement has been challenging due to the required police officers and secret service agents near the Trump Tower. And New Yorkers are  unhappy “The motorcades and security restrictions that will result will permanently paralyze the city’s streets. The swearing-in hasn’t even happened, but the swearing has already started: New Yorkers want their Fifth Avenue back.”

Ms. Sadik-Khan sees this as an opportunity to not close Fifth Avenue but to “reclaim” Fifth as a  “pedestrian street, free of private vehicular traffic but shared with mass transit. The change, which should span the stretch of the avenue from Central Park to the Empire State Building at 34th Street, would create a truly American public space: an entirely new civic platform at the nation’s new center of political gravity.” Since commercial vehicles are already banned from Fifth Avenue, two lanes would be reserved for buses, and the other three lanes could be dedicated for pedestrians. New York has already proven that streets that accommodate more people are great for business bottom lines.

“New Yorkers get their street back, the federal government gets a zone that would make the job of protecting the president easier, and President Trump gets a public space he can call his own.“

It would be a win-win all around.

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City rediscovers walking, Society

Montreal’s Innovative Neighbourhood Inspired Pedestrian Projects

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Sometimes its easier just to get out of the box, build something, call it a demonstration project-and if it is successful, make it permanent. As CBC reports that is exactly what the City of Montreal is doing on Atwater, Roy and  Wellington Streets.

The City of Montreal will spend $1.7 million dollars over three years to transform one block lengths of Roy Street East and Wellington Street, and several parts of St. Ambroise and Atwater Street. Grants will be given  to neighbourhoods to create and animate pedestrian oriented pilot projects. Depending on the effectiveness of the closures, the streets will remain fully pedestrianized year round or for part of the year.

This is the third year this program has been operating, with approval ratings as high as 90 per cent from participating neighbourhoods.

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Championing Micro Mobility & Walkable Places