Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[ijmorlan]

News on this front.

The sad news, an elderly woman crashed a vehicle into a group of girl scouts killing on child and injuring many more. A horrific collision that should never have happened. It is the nexus of everything wrong with our transportation policy. Someone who maybe shouldn't have been driving, who probably needed to killing vulnerable road users, children in this case on a busy dangerous road. It's just devastating, so many children killed in the past few years.

On the brighter side, Kitchener staff are bringing an admittedly, I believe flawed, but still honest and meaningful Vision Zero policy to council next week. It's exciting to see progress being made on these issues, even if it too little too late for entirely too many people.

Why not wait for the police report before condemning the driver? It is an awful accident, but we don't need to cast aspersions from our keyboards.

I don’t read that as a condemnation — “Someone who maybe shouldn't have been driving, who probably needed to” — given the driver is old, there is an increased probability that they no longer have the cognitive ability to drive safely; and given the way our cities are built, there is a good chance they were driving because they had no other reasonable way to get where they were going. It appears the solution to cases like this is not severe enforcement as it is with drunk driving and other types of deliberate bad driving, but rather re-designing our cities to make transit and active transportation more feasible for more people.

So it’s a reasonable speculation. We’ll see whether it turns out to be accurate in this case.