How many road deaths are acceptable?
Coderre hopes to change mindset with $150,000 publicity campaign
Hoping to one day eliminate road deaths in the city, Montreal has launched a publicity campaign with a pointed question: what would be an acceptable number of road deaths in your family?
In a vox-pop-type video ad, Montrealers are first asked how many road deaths would be acceptable, then asked how many family members they would be willing to lose.
One hundred or 1,000 would be acceptable overall, some respondents said, but all answered zero when asked about family members.
The city is spending $150,000 on the campaign, which includes TV and social media advertisements, as well as posters on bus shelters.
Mayor Denis Coderre said the city wants to “change the mindset and behaviour of all of us.”
“Everybody owns the roads and every time there’s an accident, it’s one too many,” Coderre said as he announced the campaign at city hall on Monday.
“And it could be a member of your family. What I love about that campaign is you pass from statistics to people and you realize that ‘Oh, it can apply to my family.’”
The ads are part of the “Vision Zero” campaign Coderre launched last year. Its aim is to reduce to zero the number of deaths and serious injuries on Montreal roads.
As part of the campaign, the city is lowering speed limits on many streets and working on plans to reconfigure 67 intersections to make them safer.
On Monday, Coderre was joined by some of the partner organizations the city is counting on to spread the message in the publicity campaign.
But they had different perspectives on a key issue — big trucks on city streets. Jean-François Pronovost of the Vélo Québec cycling advocacy group said the ads will help reduce road accidents in the long term by “appealing to your brain to understand that the situation has to change.”
But he said other measures are needed. “You have to manage trucks in the city,” Pronovost told reporters. “It’s like an open bar at the moment — trucks go anywhere and do anything.”
The message was somewhat different from Marc Cadieux of the Association du camionnage du Québec, which represents about 500 trucking companies
Measures taken by the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety have made it difficult for truckers to deliver goods, Cadieux told reporters.
And a law that compels drivers to keep a distance from cyclists before passing them is “nonsensical” because streets in places like the Plateau are often too narrow, with parking on both sides, he said.
Under changes made to Quebec’s Highway Safety Code last year, drivers can pass cyclists only if they maintain a safe distance — one metre on roads with a speed limit of 50 kilometres per hour or lower, and 1.5 metres when the limit is above 50 km/h.
In 2016, there were 31 road deaths in the Montreal region, one more than the previous year, according to figures compiled by the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec, the province’s auto-insurance board.
That represented a three-percent increase from 2015, but a 13-per-cent drop compared with the average number of annual deaths between 2011 and 2015.
In 2016, there were 226 serious injuries on Montreal roads, 44 fewer than the previous year. That represented a 16.3-per-cent reduction from 2015, but a 21-per-cent drop compared with the average number of serious injuries annually between 2011 and 2015.
Vision Zero is an international movement started in Sweden in 1997 meant to reduce the number of fatal or serious accidents on a specific territory to zero. It posits that humans make mistakes, so road systems should be engineered as carefully as possible to reduce accidents, the public should be educated, and rules should be enforced.