Advocates seeking improved road safety in Winnipeg
Posted December 8, 2022 5:15 pm.
Last Updated December 9, 2022 10:40 am.
Mel Marginet was hit by a driver at an intersection a year and a half ago. She sustained a wrist injury and continues to feel the effects of her injury to this day.
Marginet says the way Winnipeg streets were designed, combined with an increase in vehicle size, and a reluctance to reduce speeds leads to incidents like hers.
“You cannot move vehicles at 50 km/h or faster through complex environments, where we have people walking, biking, or shopping. You cannot have those two things in one place and expect that you are not going to kill people,” she explained.
“It’s so tragic, the rise in pedestrian deaths in Winnipeg and all vulnerable road users, bikes as well, but this is a completely predictable problem,” Marginet said. “I cannot express to you the feeling of the absolute power of that vehicle hitting you. The impact of that, you cannot believe the force of that impact.”
According to WPS, there have been 17 collisions involving pedestrians on Winnipeg streets in 2022. 11 of those have been fatal, including most recently on Saturday, where a pedestrian was killed near the St. James Bridge.
RELATED: Pedestrian killed in multi-vehicle collision in Polo Park: police
Traffic Safety Researcher and Activist Christian Sweryda says road safety could be easily improved but says there are fundamental basics that the City of Winnipeg is not doing.
“The engineering manual requires warning signs before all pedestrian corridors, Winnipeg doesn’t comply with that and we were arguing to put up warning lights at eye level at all pedestrian crosswalks and that died with an 8-8 council split, so it seems they don’t even want to do the bare minimum,” explained Sweryda.
Sweryda says there are 173 missing school zone signs and 322 missing playground signs in Winnipeg. He also says the issue surrounding timing with yellow lights has massive impacts on crash rates.
Sweryda has been fighting to fix these issues for years but says the city has flat-out refused to fix anything. Anthony Leong from Car Dependency Index says placing signs is important, but it’s not enough.
“What we really need is something to physically force drivers to slow down so there are so many traffic calming strategies to do that,” said Leong. “Raised crosswalks, continuous sidewalks, chicanes, modal filters, things that make the road feel narrower so that drivers have a psychological sense that they have to drive slowly or are physically forced to drive slow by a bump on the road.”
Councillor Matt Allard has been vocal about pedestrian collisions and road safety at City Hall. He says an audit was done in 2010 with 20 recommendations for road safety, but nothing was done. Now in 2022, the same issues are resurfacing.
Allard is asking for $100,000 for an audit to investigate potential waste and mismanagement in the signals branch.
He also says there are over $7.5 million in necessary upgrades that the city has not acted on.
“Low amount of lights at pedestrian crossings, crosswalks, warning flashers on high-speed roads, there are a whole host of safety signals that need to be put up in order for us to be safer on Winnipeg roads,” explained Allard.
MPI reports between 2017 and 2021 there were 130 motor vehicle/pedestrian collisions on average per year in the province.
Marginet says with the number of near misses involving pedestrians on the road, the situation could be much worse. “It’s astonishing that we are not doing more.”
