New rules of the road, but what about civility?
Isolated inside our vehicles, we often have little empathy toward our fellow travellers
New rules aimed at improving safety on the roads come into effect across Quebec on Saturday.
Changes include stiffer penalties for distracted driving, curfews for beginners, higher fines for cyclists and new responsibilities toward pedestrians. All are timely and much-needed updates to the Quebec Highway Safety Code, which must evolve with the times to ensure a more equitable sharing of our busy roads among cars, trucks, public transit vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians.
There’s only one problem: too many Quebec drivers fail to respect basic road-safety rules as it is, never mind obey new regulations.
A case in point: a study commissioned by the Quebec transport department examining school bus safety found that drivers routinely fail to stop for school buses loading and unloading children — an illegal and dangerous manoeuvre.
The study, conducted by Bus Patrol, equipped 13 school buses in eight cities with cameras for 45 days as they went about their daily routes. An analysis of the footage found that cars blew by school buses, with their flashing lights and extended stop signs, an average of 3.8 times a day. Extrapolating for the 8,000 school buses in Quebec, that amounts to 30,000 violations each day.
Not only is the lack of respect for an elementary and longestablished law alarming, it’s an accident waiting to happen. It’s also inexcusable. We’re talking about the safety of our children here, and surely many negligent drivers’ own kids climb aboard these yellow behemoths.
But it also speaks to some bigger issues, first among the scarce civility on the roads of Quebec.
The every-man-for-himself mentality has long prevailed on highways. My theory is that our isolation inside our vehicles smothers any sense of empathy we might have toward our fellow travellers. But when snarled traffic and construction congestion aggravate the situation, watch out.
Then there’s the rising animus between drivers and cyclists, buses and cyclists, drivers and pedestrians, cyclists and pedestrians. As we move away from being a car-centric society (or try to) and our infrastructure fails to keep pace with shifting transportation habits, conflict inevitably grows.
We saw it in the viral video of a Société de transport de Montréal bus driver nearly side-swiping and then getting in a verbal altercation with a cyclist. We saw it in the abhorrent comment on a news story about the death of cyclist Valérie Bertrand Desrochers, killed by a truck earlier this month, that celebrated “one less” bike on the road. (The victim, it turns out, was a beloved 911 dispatcher for Urgences Santé, the one on the other end of the line in emergencies.)
It’s not all drivers, of course. There are plenty of reckless cyclists and inconsiderate pedestrians. But they’re more likely to hurt themselves if their carelessness results in a collision with a hulking steel vehicle. This tremendous imbalance is why an expert report leading up to the unveiling of the changes to the new Quebec highway code actually proposed shifting the onus for safety onto drivers. This would have required cars to yield to more vulnerable road users, no matter the circumstance.
But that kind of mass-scale reeducation of drivers would have been a monumental undertaking. And with an election on the horizon, no one wanted to risk making the so-called “war on the car” (a.k.a. any attempt to curb automobile dominance) a campaign issue. So the highway traffic act underwent some light tinkering and that was that.
New rules of the road are welcome. In theory, they should give authorities more tools to crack down on bad behaviour. But key to their effectiveness is enforcement. And during the last few years, there have been plenty of indicators that drivers can simply ignore the law and get away with it.
No charges were laid when jogger Concepción Cortacans, who had the right of way, was struck mid-intersection crossing Parc Ave. by a driver who ran a red light because he was distracted by his GPS. No charges were laid, either, when an SUV making an illegal U-turn pulled into the path of elite cyclist Clément Ouimet as he descended Mount Royal. The mere mention of Ouimet will probably prompt the usual victim-blaming in what the coroner has ruled an accident, even though the cyclist wasn’t the one breaking the law.
Will we be so quick to make excuses for wrongdoing if (or when) a child disembarking from a school bus gets killed?
No matter how tough the rules, they are essentially meaningless if they can be violated with impunity. The roads are not going to get safer unless Quebec drivers undergo an attitude adjustment.
As we move away from being a car-centric society (or try to) and our infrastructure fails to keep pace with shifting transportation habits, conflict inevitably grows.