Time for city to ensure pedestrian safety at every bus stop

No one should have to die crossing the street to catch the bus. Fourteen-year-old Fernanda Girotto was doing just that when she was killed at a Burnaby crosswalk in 2018. Within a week, the City of Burnaby installed flashing lights at this location.

In a recent study conducted by my colleagues and I, we found that 150 bus stops in the City of Vancouver didn’t have a traffic light or marked crosswalk at the nearest intersection. While most of these stops are on roads with two or four traffic lanes, 17 were on roads with six traffic lanes. This is negligent in a city that prides itself on a record-high transit ridership.

I used to live near a bus stop at West 10th and Crown streets in Vancouver that involved crossing four lanes of traffic and two lanes of parked cars — without the benefit of either a pedestrian sign or painted markings on the road.

Even though drivers are required to yield to pedestrians at crosswalks, including unmarked ones, I found they rarely did.

I dreaded this crossing — and I’m young and fit. Imagine how fraught such an action is for people who are less mobile or have impaired eyesight?

I’ve put in a formal request to the city for a marked crosswalk. However, they’ve informed me that they’re no longer installing crosswalks at intersections that involve crossing four lanes of traffic. Instead, a traffic signal or pedestrian-activated light would need be installed at this location — but this isn’t likely because there are other higher-priority crossings.

And yet, my request wasn’t the first one the city had received for this particular crossing. Over the past 10 years, the elementary school, a local church and neighbourhood residents all submitted their own requests.

Ten years is much too long to wait. At the crossing where Fernanda died, neighbourhood residents had also been calling for a pedestrian light for more than 10 years.

Nor is the incident involving Fernanda an isolated one. Bus stops are, in fact, where a large percentage of vehicle-pedestrian collisions occur. A study in Metro Atlanta found that 20 per cent of pedestrian collisions occurred within 30 metres of a bus stop, and nearly half occurred within 100 metres.

Similar data isn’t available for the Lower Mainland, but, according to ICBC, three-quarters of crashes involving pedestrians take place at intersections. From 2014-18, ICBC recorded more than 11,000 crashes involving pedestrians. Sadly, 174 were fatal.

As traffic bounces back to preCOVID-19 levels, let’s get ahead of any potential collisions between drivers and pedestrians. Bus stops are an obvious place to install traffic lights and crosswalks because transit-users are crossing the street to catch the bus.

Although marked crosswalks aren’t always safer than unmarked crosswalks — especially on highspeed, multi lane roads — this doesn’t mean that we should leave these crossings unattended. At locations with more difficult crossings, additional measures can be provided to ensure safe passage. These include pedestrian-activated flashing beacons, curb extensions, traffic medians and raised crosswalks.

Vancouver has set an ambitious target to eliminate all fatalities from the transportation system as part of the Transportation 2040 plan. This target is obtainable. Just last year the City of Oslo — comparable in population size to Vancouver — recorded zero pedestrian deaths.

City staff and elected officials, I urge you to prioritize pedestrian safety at all bus stops. Let’s not wait for another pedestrian death to take quick action.