SooToday received the following letter to the editor from reader Robert Rattle in response to this story about the city removing traffic lights for a study.
People are concerned about the number of collisions at Wallace and Goulais since the traffic lights were removed.
And they should be.
But it would be a mistake to focus on that one intersection. If lights were removed elsewhere, and they have been, a similar jump in collisions would appear.
The problem is not any specific intersection. The problem is also not limited to signal removals.
The problem is not even limited to drivers not paying attention.
The problem is poor road design that leads to poor driver behaviour, and the ongoing perpetuation of that poor road design by city staff and council.
The city has known how to prevent collisions for decades.
Simple changes can provide ongoing solutions that improve driver behaviour. Design features such as narrower lanes, chicanes and bollards, raised intersections, different road surfaces, landscaping, protected cycling lanes and pedestrian spaces, speed humps, and neighbourhood traffic calming plans whenever a road is reconstructed or repaired, coupled with a moratorium on any new capacity, are proven ways to improve driver behaviour.
An immediate way to prevent collisions would be a city-wide 30 km/h maximum speed limit – a fast growing global trend. 30 km/h is safer for all road users and can be implemented today.
Thirty km/h maximum speeds can be passively enforced as roads are redesigned, repaired and capacity is reduced using the aforementioned techniques.
Link these with a Vision Zero, and the city has no excuse not to design roads that produce safe driver behaviour. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it's also been shown that these changes – that cost less to construct and maintain than unsafe road design – do not increase travel times and actually reduces congestion.
When will the city start designing roads to prevent collisions, and stop reproducing past mistakes almost every time they resurface or reconstruct a road?
Like they just decided to do for Peoples Road?
An obscenely increasing amount of taxpayer money should not be wasted perpetuating poor road design every year; designs that not only contribute to collisions, but establish a fundamentally inequitable transportation network that (deliberately) compromises children & youth, seniors, pedestrians, cyclists and accessibility needs.
We deserve better.
Robert Rattle
Sault Ste. Marie