SPEED-LIMIT INCREASES COST LIVES
Highway changes should be ■ reversed, write Gord Lovegrove, Kay Teschke, John Carsley, Ian Pike, Tarek Sayed and Jeff Brubacher.
Everyone has heard that speed kills.
Physics and biology provide the reasons. The faster we drive, the less chance we have to react to something on the road and the less control we have once we do — making crashes more likely. The faster we are travelling at impact, the more energy is transferred and the higher the chances of severe or fatal injuries.
In 2014, the B.C. Transportation Ministry hypothesized that higher speed limits might improve safety. On many highways, the higher speed cars (“85th percentile”) were travelling faster than the speed limit.
The ministry thought that by increasing speed limits on these highways, slower cars would speed up, but the fastest ones would not, thus narrowing the speed differential between the slowest and fastest cars and reducing conflict.
They expected safety to be improved. Speed limits were increased, typically by 10 km/h, on 33 segments of our rural highways. We now have three sets of evidence testing this hypothesis:
In June, Transportation Minister Todd Stone released a post-implementation update on the speed limit increases. The report found that speeds of the higher speed cars increased on 19 of the 33 highway segments, and there were minimal changes in speed differentials. Deaths went up 17 per cent and the collision rate went up 14 per cent. This marked the first increase in collision rates after a 10-year declining trend.
Jeff Brubacher, an emergency medicine professor at UBC, compared ambulance dispatches for road trauma in B.C. after the speed limit increase with those before. After accounting for seasonal variations and long-term trends, he found that they went up 11 per cent across the entire province during the six months following implementation of the new speed limits.
A study by Tarek Sayed, a civil engineering professor at UBC, focused specifically on the 1,300 kilometres of rural highway segments where speed limits were increased. He evaluated the impact of increasing the speed limits on fatal and injury collisions by comparing serious crashes on these segments versus on similar road segments with no increase. The study, published recently in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, found a statistically significant 11 per cent increase in fatal and injury crashes.
So here we have three different indicators making clear that things got worse and road safety was reduced on B.C. highways. All three are in line with international evidence: In April 2016, the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported that states with five m.p.h. (eight km/h) higher speed limits had eight per cent higher fatality rates — nearly identical to what happened here in B.C. The hypothesis has been disproven. The minister should report to the public that the increased speed limits did not improve safety, but instead made the roads more dangerous. The speed limit increases must be reversed. Even before the speed limit increases, B.C.’s traffic fatal- ity rate was higher than the Canadian average and more than twice as high as Ontario’s. Canada as a whole lags behind the safest countries in the world like Sweden, the U.K., the Netherlands and Germany, where Vision Zero — a safe systems approach that aims to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries — has been adopted.
It’s also important to note that the road segments with increased speed limits are vital to the province’s overall traffic safety. Despite representing a small proportion of our roadways, they produced 10 per cent of all traffic deaths in the province in 2014 (29 of 291).
Perhaps the real reason for introducing higher speed limits in B.C. was not safety at all. Now the question becomes: At what cost? Are lost or ruined lives worth the freedom to drive faster? Would the price be acceptable if they were your friends or family members? Jeff Brubacher is associate professor, emergency medicine; John Carsley is clinical associate professor, population and public health; Gord Lovegrove is associate professor, engineering; Ian Pike is associate professor, pediatrics; Tarek Sayed is a professor of civil engineering; and Kay Teschke is a professor of population and public health.