Speed hike came with fatal cost

Higher limits on B.C. highways led to more deaths, study finds

An increase in fatalities, injuries, crashes and insurance claims on some B.C. roads is linked to a 2014 decision by the former provincial government to raise speed limits on rural highways, according to a new study. “Our evaluation found increases in fatalities, injury and total crashes on the road segments where speed limits were increased,” according to the report published in the journal Sustainability.

The study was led by Vancouver General Hospital emergency room physician Dr. Jeff Brubacher and co-authors included road-safety engineers at the UBC Okanagan campus.

“There was a marked deterioration in road safety on the affected roads. The number of fatal crashes more than doubled (a 118 per cent increase) on roads with higher speed limits.”

Speed limits on 1,300 kilometres of provincial highways in rural areas across the province were raised in July 2014.

A maximum speed of 120 kilometres per hour on B.C. roads made them the fastest in Canada.

Earlier this year, a massive multi-vehicle crash near Hope on the Coquihalla Highway resulted in more than two dozen people being rushed to hospitals. It was another in a series of crashes on the highway that had safety experts saying the speed limit should be reduced to even lower than what it was in 2014.

Brubacher told Postmedia News “things got a lot worse” on highways where speed limits increased, especially on the Coquihalla and Malahat highways.

“You will recall there was a lot of controversy at the time. Public health experts said don’t do this and so did I,” said Brubacher, a road-safety researcher who is also an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. He chairs the British Columbia road safety strategy research and data committee and also sits on Vancouver’s traffic safety advisory group.

“All of the pro-speed arguments, like the one that people were already driving over the speed limit, have been disproven in this re- search. The pro-speed advocates who’ve lobbied for speed limit increases have based their view on crappy data at the time. The mistake should be admitted and speed rolled back because, from a safety point of view, it was the wrong decision,” he said.

Brubacher and his University of B.C. co-authors concluded their study by saying communities across Canada, especially those with slippery winter roads or those where roads traverse mountainous terrain, “should learn from this experience and resist pressure from pro-speed advocates to raise speed limits without due consideration to road safety.

“Travel in rural B.C. is particularly hazardous because of a harsh winter climate, mountainous terrain ... and the fact that large regions of the province are remote with limited access to post-crash trauma.”

B.C. Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Claire Trevena could not be reached for comment, but her ministry said in a statement periodic reviews are done and the ministry is now looking at three years of data. It is possible some speed limits will be reduced on some sections of highways.

That already began in 2016 when speed limits were rolled back on Highway 1 from Hope to Cache Creek and Highway 5A from Princeton to Merritt. On other highways, safety features were added, including road signs, rumble strips and wildlife warnings.

The ministry statement said a rural safety and speed review in 2014 resulted in higher driving penalties in addition to the increased speed limits on 33 sections of highway.

“The speed limit changes were made based on a careful and thorough engineering assessment using speed zoning practices recommended by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and adopted by road authorities throughout North America.”

However, the study said most of the latest studies show that raising speed limits results in more injuries and fatalities.

Report co-author Gord Lovegrove, a transportation engineering expert and associate professor at UBC Okanagan, said the government should have acted sooner, given his research team shared their data with the government before publication.

“Waiting three years in the face of our early findings borders on excess. I applaud the ministry’s decision to consider all options, but would appreciate if a more collaborative approach were taken, including their B.C. (academic) colleagues, as opposed to taking the additional time and valuable resources to repeat our analysis that has been published in an independent, peer-reviewed journal.”

The study also found roads with higher limits had a 43 per cent increase in auto insurance claims and a 30 per cent increase in claims for injuries sustained in crashes.

The research was based on police data, insurance claims, ambulance dispatches, gasoline sales, travel speed data collected by government stations and maps using crash site GPS co-ordinates of affected road segments. The study included statistics going back to 2000 and includes data up to 2016. It found the average number of annual crashes on affected roads was 265,187 from 2000 to 2016, including 488 that involved fatalities. From 2008 to 2014, for example, there was an average of 22 crashes each year involving fatalities. But once the speed limit rose, the number of fatal crashes rose to 33 in each of the following two years.

Todd Stone, transportation minister at the time of the changes, did not respond to interview requests.