Political meddling behind revisions to speed limits
Leave it to professional engineers, Ian Tootill writes.
B.C. Transportation Minister Claire Trevena set back motorists when she announced speed-limit rollbacks on nearly half of the 33 highway segments where speed limits were raised in 2014. Motorists, who have been travelling at safe and legal speeds following the 2014 Rural Highway Safety and Speed Review, will now encounter more police enforcement for politically set limits. This means more wasted police resources devoted to minor-offence violators, who aren’t the root problem on affected highways, increased travel costs and frustrated motorists.
It’s no secret the NDP needs money to shore up ICBC, and drivers will enter the holiday season stuffing treasury stockings for the wrong reasons.
Recently, ICBC announced rate increases and increases to fines and penalty point premiums. It’s likely no coincidence those announcements followed a report that implied that speed-limit increases had caused more crashes and fatalities.
The report’s authors are part of the same crowd pushing Photo Radar 2.0, which includes a vocal B.C. group of publicly funded academic/ health professional cycling advocates. They are cheerleaders for the Vision Zero movement, whose modus operandi is to frustrate and expense drivers into oblivion. When speed limits are reviewed and properly set by engineers, without their interference, they call it an “experiment.” They gained publicity in October with little critical examination of their road-carnage claims. We have long advocated reviews of highway speed limits and setting them using principles and methodology recommended by transportation engineers. We’ve also said politicians and special interests should have less influence on the process.
Special interests should have less influence on the process.
Contrary to the Vision Zero advocates’ spin, there is no indictment of the actions of previous minister Todd Stone, who relied on engineers to do their jobs. Transportation Ministry staff did an excellent job of the 2014 and 2018 reviews, gathering reliable data and establishing baselines for future analysis and reviews.
However, 2018 review data contradicts both Trevena’s conclusions and her decree, which suggests political meddling occurred.
Facts noticed by few in media include that 16 — just more than half — of the affected highway segments had no reduction in safety and instead saw a 14 per cent decrease in collisions.
Three of the segments where Trevena rolled back speed limits saw either the same or reduced serious-collision rates. Noteworthy is that two of the 33 segments already had a rollback to pre-2014 speed limits (from the earlier review), yet they saw the largest increase in collisions at 72.9 per cent.
While it is true that 15 of 33 affected highway segments showed a reduction in safety, they were modest in actual terms. However, many had no correlation with an increase in natural vehicle speeds (85th percentile). Of those 15 segments, the flow of traffic speeds either remained the same or dropped in seven segments. Speeding over the limit was clearly a minor player as a contributing factor.
Regardless, Trevena’s position was that any roadway with an increase in crashes for any reason, no matter how small, was a chance to cut the speed limit by 10 km/ h. Some of the road segments had one bad year, which does not represent a trend.
To summarize, approximately half of the affected highway segments saw a 14 per cent decrease in collisions. And, while the other half did see an increase, only half of those segments saw an increase in travel speeds, and some even saw a reduction.
The 2018 review was not an indictment of principled engineering decisions. On the contrary, it validates the position that social/ special interest, professional lobbyists and politicians should butt out and leave speed-limit setting to the professionals who are trained in the field of engineering.