Three Hunt Club Road intersections top list for most collisions in 2016
Half of worst offenders involve the south-end thoroughfare
Beware the afternoon commute, especially if you’re on Hunt Club Road and it’s a Thursday in December.
When and where you’re most likely to have a traffic collision are part of the City of Ottawa’s Road Safety Report now available online. And once again, three Hunt Club Road intersections top the list as the 10 worst intersections in the city for collisions.
Hunt Club Road and Riverside Drive recorded the most collisions in 2016 with 43, followed by Hunt Club and Prince of Wales Drive at 36 and Hunt Club and Woodroffe Avenue with 35. Those same three intersections, albeit in a different order, also topped the list for most collisions in 2007 and have stayed at or near the top for most of the last decade.
Numbers 4 and 5 were Montreal Road and Vanier Parkway and Hunt Club (again) and Hawthorne Road, each with 33 collisions. The good news is that none of the 354 collisions in the top 10 intersections involved a fatality or even a serious injury, according to the report.
In all, there were 26 traffic fatalities in Ottawa in 2016: 13 drivers or passengers, six motorcyclists or motorcycle passengers, four pedestrians and three bicyclists. That’s four more than 2015, but just below the five-year average of 26.6 road fatalities.
The report also breaks down the number of collisions by month, day of the week, time of day and road conditions. Two-thirds of collisions occurred when roads were dry, 19 per cent when roads were covered in snow, ice or slush and 16 per cent when roads were wet.
December had the most collisions with 1,537 (though February and January were close behind) while April had the fewest with 944.
The afternoon commute is far more hazardous than the morning drive. Drivers were nearly twice as likely to have a collision rushing to get home between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. than they were heading into work between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m.
And surprisingly, Thursday unseated long-standing fender bending champion Friday as the day most likely to have a crash. Thursdays in 2016 included 2,527 road collisions — 159 more than the number of Friday collisions, which had been the city’s crashiest day for the past four years running. Also surprisingly, Monday is the least likely week day to be involved in a collision.
All told, there were 14,023 traffic collisions in Ottawa in 2016, the fewest number since 2008, the ear- liest year for which data are avail- able on the city’s website. The full report, which includes data from collisions on provincial roads in Ottawa such as highways 7, 416 and 417, as well as federal parkways and Island Park Drive, is available at ottawa.ca under transportation and parking.