Taking baby steps toward pedestrian safety
On the day Outremont unveiled a pilot project to create a 3D crosswalk at a hazardous intersection, a 65-year-old walking along Gouin Blvd. in Montreal North was mowed down by a dump truck.
A tragedy coinciding with an announcement. A death underscoring yet again the dangers pedestrians and cyclists face in Montreal. One step forward and one step back. In so many ways, these contrasting events — happenstance, though not completely unrelated — are symbolic of the challenges this city faces when it comes to improving road safety.
As traffic gets worse and more people opt to walk or cycle, the increased sharing of the roadway, which was once the uncontested domain of vehicles, is resulting in conflict — and risk for more vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists.
The man crushed by the truck Tuesday was the seventh pedestrian to die on the streets of Montreal so far this year, according to police. Two cyclists have also been killed. The death toll last year was 69 pedestrians province-wide, up from 62 the year before, according to the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec. That’s an 11-per-cent increase in one year and a 25-per-cent jump from the average of the previous four.
Meanwhile, 11 cyclists were killed in 2017, three more than in 2016.
Two of the most recent road deaths this summer involved heavy trucks, illustrating one common peril.
Like the pedestrian who was hit and dragged by a turning truck in Montreal North, cyclist Valérie Bertrand Desrochers was struck in June when a dump truck making a right-hand turn cut through the bike path where she was riding on St-Zotique St.
Both deaths have renewed calls for heavy trucks in this city to be outfitted with skirts that would prevent people from being caught under their wheels in the case of an accident. This demand has been repeated over and over since 2005, when Jessica Holman-Price was killed by a snowremoval truck after pushing her younger brother out of harm’s way as they waited to cross the street outside the Westmount YMCA. It has been echoed by coroners investigating the deaths of so many seniors run down by turning snow-removal trucks. While many city vehicles have since been equipped with the side guards, they are not mandatory for private trucks. They should be.
Reacting to Tuesday’s death, Mayor Valérie Plante also hinted new rules are in store for heavy trucks on Montreal’s residential streets. They can’t come soon enough.
Stricter rules are one piece of the puzzle when it comes to making the roads safer. And Quebec’s highway traffic act was recently updated with new regulations and tougher penalties at the start of July.
Before and since Montreal implemented the Vision Zero protocol to promote safety, many boroughs and the central city lowered speed limits.
But the other component is, of course, renewed infrastructure. On that, the pace of change is slower, as the resources and efforts required to redesign intersections, widen sidewalks and build separated bike lanes take time.
That’s what makes Outremont’s pilot project so promising. At a slightly elevated price compared with a normal crosswalk paint job, it is trying to do with an optical illusion what would probably cost far more if it were using concrete and asphalt. It’s certainly worth a shot — and cities big and small have been painting intersections with everything from polka dots to hopscotch to rainbows to art works in an attempt to slow cars and give more space to pedestrians.
While taking a paint brush to problem spots can certainly be a quick, cost-effective and even pretty fix, there’s one downside in Montreal. The paint seems to fade too quickly, whether it’s a bike lane, sharrows giving bicycles priority on designated streets or the green boxes intended to make cyclists more visible at stop lights.
This can lead to confusion about the right of way — something those who use Prince Arthur St. near McGill University have witnessed this summer. It is supposed to have a single lane of eastbound traffic and a bike path on each side, one going against the flow of traffic.
But the lines are now so faint that aggressive motorists drive over them, trying to squeeze by other cars and tailgate cyclists as if it were a two-lane street and those on bikes were in their way. If the lines were clearer, perhaps this would happen less.
But, frankly, many drivers seem completely ignorant of (or are they simply ignoring ?) the painted lines re-apportioning space on the roads when it comes to new measures like those green bike boxes meant to place cyclists up front in intersections.
Maybe the 3D oeuvre in Outremont will be more effective in modifying the behaviour of motorists.
For now, creatively painted intersections seem like a step in the right direction, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll get us very far.