Road Safety Programs

Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You! This is probably the biggest concern among motorcycle riders everywhere and with good reason. Last year in B.C., 1,600 motorcyclists were injured in 2,600 crashes. In addition, on average, 34 riders die in crashes each year on our roads. This is what a snapshot looks like today.

The City of St. Paul, Minnesota has created an innovative program to increase driver compliance with the requirement to yield to pedestrians at unsignalized marked crosswalks in the city. Prior to this initiative, The study initially observed 32% of drivers yielding and frequent multiple threat passing incidents.

WalkRollMap.org is a crowdsourcing tool for mapping micro barriers to accessible walking and rolling. What is a micro barrier? Anything that makes it harder (or maybe even impossible!) to walk or roll safely or comfortably in your community. It might be a missing crosswalk, uneven payment, or unplowed snow. Whatever it is that is getting in your way, or missing (e.g. bench or washroom) we want to know what it is and where! Mappers can also report if they’ve been hit while walking or rolling, had a near miss, or a fall.

Does your community have a road safety plan? If if does, your local government is probably ahead of most. If it doesn't, you should be asking your elected representatives why this is the case. After all, you are more likely to suffer financial loss, injury or death from a traffic related incident than you are from all other criminal actions combined.

Every year in Canada, drivers kill 16 child pedestrians and 5 child cyclists. They also injure 1,300 and 700 respectively. Sadly most of these incidents are preventable and we can do things to make it safer for children to walk or ride a bicycle in our community.

BC's Occupation Health and Safety Regulation imposes duties on employers whose employees drive either their own or a company owned vehicle for work. Road Safety at Work has published an Employers' Guide to Road Safety Requirments to assist employers in fulfilling those duties.

RoadSafetyBC secured funding of $612,000 from Transport Canada's Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program for the BC Road Safety Revitalization Project. The project addresses address current and emerging road safety issues across the province, with wide-ranging and varied delivery locations.

One definition of crowdsourcing is where an organization obtains ideas from a large, relatively open and often rapidly evolving group of participants. An example of how this can be applied to road safety is found in the Spring 2021 edition of Transportation Talk, a publication of the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers. The City of Edmonton is asking it's citizens to participate as part of it's current Safe Mobility Strategy 2021 - 2025.

We are becoming more and more aware that our streets have been designed for motor vehicles and they are not prepared to accommodate cycle and pedestrian traffic safely. If we approach municipal authorities, their engineers point to the TAC Geometric Design Guide for Canadian Roads and refuse to budge from what it contains.

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs seek to increase the number of students who use active transportation (walking & cycling) methods to travel to and from school. Increasing physical activity has the potential to improve health. SRTS programs aim to accomplish this goal through engineering, education, enforcement, encouragement, equity, and evaluation.