Experts want road safety made national priority

OTTAWA – Canadian road safety experts are calling on the federal government to make reducing road deaths and injuries a national priority.

“The Canadian approach to road safety has not been sufficient to provide Canada with the lowest possible levels of road trauma. Each year in Canada approximately 1,900 people are killed in road crashes and many thousands are seriously injured and hospitalized,” wrote the authors of an open letter to transport minister Marc Garneau.

The letter was signed by British Columbia road safety expert Neil Arason, author of No Accident: Eliminating Injury and Death on Canadian Roads, along with Graham Larkin, the head of Vision Zero Canada, and Ahmed Shalaby, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Manitoba and technical director of Safer Roads Canada.

It comes a week after more than 140 countries agreed to cut international road deaths by half over the next decade in what is being called the Stockholm Declaration.

Canada supports the declaration, but did not send a minister to the conference for which it was criticized. A spokesman for Transport Canada said Garneau was not able to attend ministerial meetings before the conference due to his schedule.

The authors of the open letter want the federal government to go beyond supporting the Stockholm Declaration and to set specific targets for road safety and to create a funded “action plan for change” that will reduce road fatalities and injuries by half in the next 10 years.

They point to the federal government’s failure to update vehicle regulations for “optimum safety” similar to regulations in parts of the world with the best traffic safety records. They also criticize Transport Canada for failing to take action to make buses more crashworthy after deadly bus crashes.