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Road Safety & Vision Zero Plan

crs1026 said:
^Pro tip: Those things dislodge (and disappear) really easily during snowplow season.

They do seem to slow auto traffic, but if the road has minimal allowance for cyclists, they actually create a hazard because motorists have less ability to move over to give cyclists their fair space.

A pretty high maintenance item, I don’t know if there is a standard governing where the City places them, I suspect it’s mostly where local residents make noise.

- Paul
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A few bollards in the middle of the road would work as well, and be more durable.
 
A nearby town uses them but brings them before winter. I have seen them in other towns and assume they do the same. Anything in the middle of the road will eventually have a snowbank around it further narrowing the road unless it is cleared by hand. Operating a large plow on a large truck isn't that surgical.
 
I know the city is rolling those out, and have seen them in many places, but this is the first one I've seen in the St. Lawrence area.
 
Looks like she's probably talking on the phone? But pedestrians rule the streets in Kensington anyways, so I doubt those cars were crawling along at much more than 5 km/h.
 
Do you guys think holding municipalities financially responsible for negligent road design leading to death would be an effective way to improve road safety? Infrastructure design is a contributing factor in many (if not most) road deaths, so I don’t see why municipalities should be able to escape liability here.

In my mind, this is kind of similar to how air travel safety works. A pilot may crash their plane, and be 100% at fault for it, however regulators, airlines and manufacturers will still look at the incident and see what can be changed to ensure an incident like this never happens again. This proactive attitude with regards to airplane safety has made air travel virtually the safest form of transport around.

I hope that holding municipalities responsible for poor road design would foster a similar proactive attitude with regards to road safety. A municipality will be a lot less willing to negligently risk the lives of their residents on their roads if they know that doing so would lose the municipality millions of dollars. In that kind of environment, something like separated bike lanes suddenly becomes an important financial investment, as opposed to something that's just "nice to have".

This move would also change road safety from being a purely political debate, to also being a financial and legal debate. It's a lot easier to push for these changes at local City Halls, when you can say "this will be the financial impact of our negligence".
 
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TheTigerMaster said:
Do you guys think holding municipalities financially responsible for negligent road design leading to death would be an effective way to improve road safety? Infrastructure design is a contributing factor in a lot of road deaths, so I don’t see why municipalities should be able to escape liability here.
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I wonder if you could sue the city for negligently designing roads in ways that have been academically proven to be unsafe - not dissimilar to what these youth are doing provincially with climate change
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Do you guys think holding municipalities financially responsible for negligent road design leading to death would be an effective way to improve road safety? Infrastructure design is a contributing factor in many (if not most) road deaths, so I don’t see why municipalities should be able to escape liability here.

In my mind, this is kind of similar to how air travel safety works. A pilot may crash their plane, and be 100% at fault for it, however regulators, airlines and manufacturers will still look at the incident and see what can be changed to ensure an incident like this never happens again. This proactive attitude with regards to airplane safety has made air travel virtually the safest form of transport around.

I hope that holding municipalities responsible for poor road design would foster a similar proactive attitude with regards to road safety. A municipality will be a lot less willing to negligently risk the lives of their residents on their roads if they know that doing so would lose the municipality millions of dollars. In that kind of environment, something like separated bike lanes suddenly becomes an important financial investment, as opposed to something that's just "nice to have".
Click to expand...

duffo said:
I wonder if you could sue the city for negligently designing roads in ways that have been academically proven to be unsafe - not dissimilar to what these youth are doing provincially with climate change
Click to expand...

Indeed this concept is very similar to the carbon tax imposed on polluting industry (although I would not publicly market it that way, for PR reasons).

Polluters didn't care about polluting because polluting costs them nothing. If we attach a fee to the pollution, suddenly businesses have a real incentive to pollute less.

Municipalities don't care about road deaths, because death costs them nothing. If we attach a fee to road deaths, suddenly municipalities have a real incentive to ensure road deaths are as close to zero as possible (ahem... Vision Zero)
 
afransen said:
They can probably hide behind professional orgs design standards. So perhaps they would need to be sued as well to effect change.
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But they could sue that the design standards do not provide adequate safety? I think the argument could be made.
 
^It strikes me that the idea has great intellectual merit but little political saleability, and too many loopholes to be implementable.

Roadway deaths already have an enormous societal financial impact - just ask the insurance industry. If we can't convince decisionmakers to rewrite the standards and correct (rather than grandfather) attributes that no longer are acceptable, based on a reduction in that huge societal cost, I don't think a tax or fee would help.

- Paul
 
afransen said:
They can probably hide behind professional orgs design standards. So perhaps they would need to be sued as well to effect change.
Click to expand...

TRONto said:
But they could sue that the design standards do not provide adequate safety? I think the argument could be made.
Click to expand...

I find it curious how in other fields of engineering there is virtually zero tolerance for risk to life, while with roads and other civil infrastructure, we find death to be a totally acceptable risk of use. Perhaps that's a cultural attitude that needs to be revisited. After all, there is no technolgical or engineering reason why road deaths cannot be reduced to virtually zero.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Do you guys think holding municipalities financially responsible for negligent road design leading to death would be an effective way to improve road safety? Infrastructure design is a contributing factor in many (if not most) road deaths, so I don’t see why municipalities should be able to escape liability here.

In my mind, this is kind of similar to how air travel safety works. A pilot may crash their plane, and be 100% at fault for it, however regulators, airlines and manufacturers will still look at the incident and see what can be changed to ensure an incident like this never happens again. This proactive attitude with regards to airplane safety has made air travel virtually the safest form of transport around.

I hope that holding municipalities responsible for poor road design would foster a similar proactive attitude with regards to road safety. A municipality will be a lot less willing to negligently risk the lives of their residents on their roads if they know that doing so would lose the municipality millions of dollars. In that kind of environment, something like separated bike lanes suddenly becomes an important financial investment, as opposed to something that's just "nice to have".

This move would also change road safety from being a purely political debate, to also being a financial and legal debate. It's a lot easier to push for these changes at local City Halls, when you can say "this will be the financial impact of our negligence".
Click to expand...

crs1026 said:
^It strikes me that the idea has great intellectual merit but little political saleability, and too many loopholes to be implementable.

Roadway deaths already have an enormous societal financial impact - just ask the insurance industry. If we can't convince decisionmakers to rewrite the standards and correct (rather than grandfather) attributes that no longer are acceptable, based on a reduction in that huge societal cost, I don't think a tax or fee would help.

- Paul
Click to expand...

But who is paying for the social and financial costs of roadways deaths? The people that are building, operating and maintaining these roadways have little incentive to improve the status quo, unless themselves or their organization(s) personally have to bare financial and social the costs of their decisions.

Again, I think pollution is a worthy comparison. There is a social and financial cost to factory owners dumping toxic waste into rivers. But the factory owner has little incentive to improve, because the cost to themselves is too negligible to be worth consideration.

Municipalities are generally the people building, operating and maintaining these roadways, so they must be the ones that bare the social and financial cost of their reckless design decisions causing death.
 
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