LETTER: Collisions can be prevented through road design

SooToday received the following letter to the editor from reader Robert Rattle regarding the proposed parking ban on Morrison Avenue and overall road design.

Banning parking on Morrison Avenue is likely to contribute more to the cause of collisions than prevent collisions.

The Canadian Motor Vehicle Traffic Collision Statistics identify the number, types and causes of collisions annually. Every single one of the listed causes – impaired, distracted, speed, aggression, tiredness and environmental – are the result of driver error.

But drivers aren’t ultimately to blame – drivers are primed to make those errors.

Our roads are designed to be efficient and convenient. Wide roads with clear lines of sight and too many lanes (called forgiving design), far too many roads, and excessive rights of way given to motor vehicles generate psychological effects on drivers that induce unsafe driving behaviour.

Roads designed this way inherently normalize dangerous driving behaviour, and it shows in the Sault.

Speed (well, all causes of collisions) has become so bad that the city established a speed management task force – a result of citizens raising concerns about unsafe local drivers (road design) and the number of collisions.

Drivers are only the proximate cause of collisions. In every collision there are causes that drivers have little control over. Road design that normalizes dangerous driving is the primary cause.

On the other hand, the city has complete control over road design.

Every time the city reconstructs or resurfaces a road, they can enforce safe driver behaviour across the entire city through proper road design – narrower lanes, chicanes and bollards, raised intersections, protected cycling lanes and pedestrian spaces, speed humps, and neighbourhood traffic calming plans. And designing roads for 30 kph – a fast growing trend – is safer for all road users.

Parked cars – as city staff confirmed for Morrison – are not a collision problem.

Road design – as the speed management task force confirms – is. To mitigate the risk of collisions on Morison and everywhere, drivers need to slow down and drive for the conditions, be respectful, and share the road … through proper road design.

Removing parking does not design a road for that behaviour.

On the contrary, removing parking is a road design factor – forgiving design – that generates psychological effects for drivers that induce and normalize unsafe driving across the entire city.

Morrison Avenue didn’t have to be a false dichotomy between parking or no parking. We can safely design roads with parking anywhere in the city. Morrison Avenue could have benefitted from the addition of chicanes or bollards, a raised intersection at North Street – it is after all less than two blocks from a public school – speed humps, narrower road, or a traffic calming plan for the entire neighbourhood.

We just need to decide whether we want city-wide road design that normalizes unsafe driving, or whether we want to build roads that motivate courtesy and respect for communities that are safe and inclusive.

Collisions can be easily prevented through proper road design. But it must be a whole city approach.

In the meantime how will this change in parking protect cyclists and pedestrians, or a child on their way to a play date – who WILL be moving far slower than a motor vehicle doing the (posted) speed limit?

– Robert Rattle