Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

One of the major limitations of the region's annual collision report is that it only captures collisions on regional roads and at signalized intersections. For example, there were 20 road fatalities in the region in 2020 according to WRPS, but only 7 listed in the traffic report.

I also seriously question whatever methodology regional staff are using to gather data on excess speed, and that "speeding on
regional roads is not a significant factor in collisions". It's not believable that only 40 out of 7975 collisions involved drivers exceeding that speed limit, or that excess speed was only a factor in 175 collisions. WRPS says excess speed was a factor in the majority of fatalities in 2020, and Statistics Canada says it's a factor in around 20% overall in Canada, and anyone who drives knows most drivers routinely exceed the speed limit.

Pretty much any time residential speed limits are discussed, people demand data showing actual pedestrian collisions and fatalities in residential areas to justify any improvement in road safety. They frequently point to the annual collision reports showing most pedestrian collisions occur at signalized intersections, which is presumably in part because the reports literally don't include any data that could show otherwise. Of course, it also ignores the fact that collision data doesn't capture near misses or the perception of safety, and that traffic calming makes neighbourhoods more walkable and pedestrian-friendly with little impact on vehicle traffic. I don't need someone to be killed in front of my home to know my street is dangerous, given all three streetlights in my little 90m section of street have been taken out by vehicles coming around the corner too fast while I've lived here. And to be clear, I don't think just lowering speed limits makes much difference, but even discussing it brings out the "war on cars" people in force demanding data that doesn't seem to exist to justify any kind of change, regardless of the benefits.

This doesn't specifically address the issue, but the Kitchener GeoHub has a dataset of traffic collision locations from 2005 to 2018. I made a combined map showing collision locations, traffic light locations, and city roads marked. Any blue dot on this map on a marked road that isn't at a red dot is a collision that wasn't captured in the annual traffic report. You can zoom in and check your own street if you live in Kitchener. I'm unclear on whether this actually includes pedestrian collisions, but it's pretty clear that traffic collisions in general happen all over the place, including most residential areas.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/in...a0d339c0b8

Yeah, I agree with all of this. I've seen this discussion going on online.

I really don't know what to think. I suspect this is mostly bad faith--i.e., these people wouldn't support lowering the speeds on ... say... arterial streets either.

But I do think this is an important policy. We need to use every tool at our disposal. Lower speed limits isn't a complete solution in and of itself, but it is a component of every other solution. You cannot use ASE to enforce a lower speed than the limit, our engineers refuse to design a road for a lower speed than the limit, police refuse to call "speed" a factor in a collision where the driver was travelling even remotely close to the limit at the time of impact.

It also is a policy which does have some effect on it's own. If even 5% of drivers lowered their speed as a result of the change, on a two lane residential street that would lower the speed of traffic because drivers who refuse to slow down still cannot go faster than those in front of them.

I also think it's a policy that's easy to support. Yes...tons of people make often bad faith, always selfish arguments against it, but most people, and especially most people who have the most political sway (you know, own houses) live in residential areas and don't like people speeding past their homes. It's a policy which wealthy drivers can see themselves benefiting from. I am, frankly, surprised, and disappointed that Waterloo reversed their decision on the 30km/h limit. It makes no sense, these people made that decision, but they didn't seem to run on that as a platform, and I think it should have been subject to the usual 60% bar on reversing a previous council's decision.

*sigh*...I just don't get it...why are people so afraid of having nice things?