Also goes to show how much people pay attention to what they are doing. It's like that Hyundai commercial that locks the door when the girl goes to get out into traffic. The line "and when the unexpected happens..." kills me since people should always look for a car when they get out into traffic, there's nothing unexpected about that. People just aren't good at paying attention these days, and when that inevitably causes an issue, they look for someone else to blame lol.
Always relevant here is the process safety or the "swiss cheese" model:
The hazard is driving a powerful, moving, heavy vehicle around other powerful, moving and heavy vehicles in a busy urban environment with people, bicycles and property everywhere.
Starting from left to right, in Calgary road design, we historically have set
engineering controls for safety too permissively (e.g. we design most roads to be faster than they need to be ). This creates a bigger hole in the first layer. Wide roads are a big part, but also slip lanes are everywhere for high-speed turns and other designs that encourage higher speeds and more severe collisions with pedestrians. Put another way - all our "we want safely designed roads" talk is actually "we want safely designed roads [as long as cars don't have to slow down very much]"
Another interesting example that's more auto industry-wide; there's zero attempt to engineer cars to obey the speed limit yet which would be technically possible and solve a ton of issues. Ironically, the e-bicycle and e-scooter industry has loads of engineered restrictions on speed and power, despite weighing 10-50x less and travelling at 10x slower. Can't go faster than 5km/h in the Stampede Grounds on a scooter for example (but I digress).
After the design or our roads and cars, we then layer in
administrative controls (speed limits). Unfortunately, because we engineering the streets to feel like you can drive faster than the speed limit in many situations, the "holes" line right up. This is why speed limits aren't effective - they do little to make the street safer and rely on drivers to fight their natural feeling that they can drive faster. Tools to increase the effectiveness of administrative controls like photo-radar and police enforcement is random, minimal and completely ineffective. There's no incentive to follow the rules. Again there's no technological limit to just install photo-radar on every street everywhere so that the incentive is so high it forces people to drive safer.
This gets into the final step,
behavioural controls. We tell people to "behave" (public announcements to slow down, please drive safely) we get people to do a drivers test once when they are 16 years old and never again. This is the weakest layer of protection because it relies on people to be safe in their choices - which assumes they want to be safe (1), they know what safe options are (2), they don't make mistakes or misjudge any random situation that comes up on the road (3). It's not just selfish jerks that ignore the rules, it's also just plain mistakes that kill people. Better and more rigorous driving training helps - but you can't eliminate all the mistakes people will make in all conditions.
So now a collision has occurred - time to mitigate. If a car was going slower to begin with, the damage and injury would be less severe. If we separate cyclists and pedestrians with physical barriers and bollards we can sometimes reduce the risk they get hit (this is the issue with un-projected bicycle lanes).
The whole point:
Because we do so little with engineering controls, we leave far too much of our road safety up to administrative controls (which we refuse to enforce) and behavourial controls (which are the least effective). Telling people to just drive safer is all good but won't mean anything as people are incentivized to drive fast; they can and will make mistakes or act recklessly. Design a road to make people drive slower is a key part to increasing actual safety.
engage.calgary.ca
