City meets road safety target — but there’s a catch

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This article was published 06/09/2024 (392 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While the City of Winnipeg has technically achieved a key target to reduce fatal and serious injury crashes, deadly collisions remain a concern and pandemic travel changes skewed the data, a new report says.

In 2022, the city “met and exceeded” its road safety goal to reduce those collisions by 20 per cent, which it had hoped to meet by the end of 2027. The number was actually down 35 per cent for the year, the most recent one studied.

However, city staff note COVID-19 travel changes skewed the results that year, the most recent one studied. When only fatal collisions were counted, the number rose.

Council’s public works chairwoman stressed further road safety improvements are needed.

“Distracted driving, speed and impaired driving are top reasons (for crashes). So people need to smarten up on the road,” said Coun. Janice Lukes, chairwoman of public works.

The collision data shows the combined number of fatal and serious injury collisions dropped from 177 to 115, when comparing a five-year average from 2015 to 2019 and the year 2022.

Meanwhile, in 2022, fatal injury crashes accounted for 21 per cent of the two types of collisions studied, or 25 of them, up from seven per cent for the five-year average.

Lukes said more safety improvements are on the way, since the city has dedicated four staff to its road safety action plan and expects to spend $30 million on road safety initiatives over the next six years.

“I’m ecstatic that we’ve got a team now strictly focused on road safety… We are making leaps and bounds of progress over anything we’ve done ever in the past… At the same time, we really need to do this because there’s a lot of challenges,” she said.

The staff report also notes road safety concerns remain.

“Although the overall number of fatal and serious injury collisions was significantly lower than previous years, the proportion of collisions that resulted in a fatality increased in 2022. Just under half of those killed were pedestrians,” it notes.

In recent years, the city reduced some speed limits to 30 km/h from 50 km/h and added traffic calming measures around school zones.

In 2025, the city plans to review speed limits in residential areas and arterial streets, while traffic calming measures may also be installed near schools, playgrounds and other locations as part of road renewals.

“Our city is 150 years old, our road engineering has evolved over time. Newer treatments, new applications really evolve and we have to chisel away at it,” said Lukes.

Mark Cohoe, executive director of Bike Winnipeg, said he doesn’t draw many conclusions from the 2022 data, as he believes trends will become clearer over a longer time period.

Cohoe said he’s glad the city approved new road safety spending but pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths remain far too common, meaning some people are afraid of cycling.

“The fear of traffic… really is the biggest barrier to getting more people biking,” he said.

Cohoe said the city is still facing backlogs in adding pedestrian corridors and flashing beacons, while it could also benefit from more video monitoring to better track “near misses,” where collisions are barely averted.

“We need to get to a position of being proactive… so we’re not reacting to a collision report from 2022 (in 2024),” he said.

joyanne.pursaga@freepress.mb.ca

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