TheTigerMaster
Superstar
We'd have safer roads virtually overnight if insurance companies regularly took municipalities to court over their roadway designs, and could get proper compensation.
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Northern Light
Superstar
There may be a plausible precedent after last year's Supreme Court of Canada decisions allowing people to sue municipalities for negligent levels of snow removal/winter maintenance.
Two key elements of the decision are highlighted in the above:
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Using the above standard, I think its easy enough to say if the City creates a sidewalk and/or crosswalk it invites a pedestrian to use them.
If an accident then ensues, its possible to make a claim if on the balance of probabilities the accident was a result of poor urban design, maintenance or lack of enforcement of laws.
* not a lawyer here, and not asserting that such a claim would be easy; but the woman in the case above, and her lawyers climbed a steep mountain and won.....
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
As far as I’m aware, I’ve never seen an insurance company sue for negligent road designs. I’m assuming they would if they could. Any idea if municipalities are somehow shielded from liability?
Northern Light
Superstar
I edited my post as you were yourself posting. See the key bits that inform the decision, which only happened last October.
Prior to that, most municipalities could have defended against such a claim using a 'core policy' defense.
Essentially arguing its a political decision as to how much money is allocated to snow clearing (or, I infer to Vision Zero)
and therefore immune from claim.
The Court suggested otherwise in its ruling, I would argue.
Whether or not that spins off a lot of litigation is a different matter.
It will remain a burden to prove that the City's inaction likely resulted in the consequence.
crs1026
Superstar
I'm not a lawyer either.... but I suspect that the defence would be "due diligence".... ie if the road design is signed off by a licensed engineer who has competently applied an existing set of codes or standards, then the engineer is following professional standards appropriately and the standard arguably represents a consensus of experts about what is acceptable.
One would have to challenge the standard itself.... and as noted, there might be an onus to prove empirically that the standard is unacceptably deficient. That would require a lot of data. One could not use specific one-of cases.... the data would have to be cases where there are no other root causes (driver error, weather, whatever) that would dilute the liability.
And the codes and standards likely can be argued to be predicated on perfect driver behaviour, which we know is an iffy assumption.
I can't dispute your core point -- as a society we are absurdly tolerant of the loss of human life on our roads, even in comparison to other risky behaviours that we accept. But I'm not clever enough to figure how one would mount a legal argument that changes that, let alone connects road design to an obligation to do better.
- Paul
lenaitch
Senior Member
It would still have to be litigated somehow. An impaired driver takes a sharp curve too fast and dies. Who's at fault? To what degree? Contributory negligence is a thing, but it has to be ruled on.
In the aviation example, investigators (in our case, the TSB) make recommendations to Transport Canada, who is the regulator. They are not always acted upon.
You mean a 'per death' levy? What if the road design had nothing to do with the fatality? As above, it would have to be litigated.
Or we'd have higher taxes and insurance rates because two giants were duking it out in court all the time. Very few negligence claims ever go to trial. Provided an insurance company can remain profitable, they have little incentive to spend big bucks chasing litigation. A motorist's/pedestrian's/estate's insurance company would take on the municipality's/province's insurance company and some settlement reached, all paid for but taxes and insurance premiums. Or the municipalities (or province) would privatize the roads to reduce risk exposure.
afransen
Senior Member
Essentially we are trading road deaths for travel speed/level of service. If you do the math on what a life is worth, each life saved is worth on the order of $10m. City of Toronto has 60-70 road deaths per year. In other words, the value of the lives lost is about $650m per year. Would adding some traffic delays to improve safety cost more than the potential savings in life lost?
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
Just to be clear, all I'm suggesting is that as a general principal, municipalities should be held financially liability for their negligent road designs leading to injury/death. Lawyer and economists and all those smart people would be better positioned to hammer out details like this.
I don't think the impacts would be nearly as catastrophic as you imagine.
I imagine a real-world policy implementation would look a lot like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). That means that municipalities would be given an extended period of time to implement road safety measures, before enforcement takes place (whether that be though litigation, fines or other means). Queen's Park can also presumably limit the liabilities faced by municipalities, such that they won't be faced with unreasonable liability.
Like with AODA, I'd imagine that a road safety political program would also come bundled with billions in funding for infrastructure upgrades. Municipalities would have no excuse for non-compliance.
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TheTigerMaster
Superstar
I imagine this would all be settled in court. That would be up for a judge to decide and set precedents. Presumably, the municipality would not be responsible in cases of drunk drivers. That seems sensible.
On the other hand, if there's a segment of road that regularly has crashes, and the municipality chooses to ignore it, then the city should face significant liability for any accidents or deaths.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidental, but three accidents under similar/identical circumstances in the same location is indicative of a design flaw in the road, and that means the municipality should face liability (I'm saying this as a general principal).
Using airplanes as an analogy (again): If three planes were to crash under identical circumstances, that plane would probably be grounded until they find a fix. If the problem was pilot error, they'd engineer the systems to ensure that it's tolerant of operator failure. I don't see why our roadways should be held to any less stringent a standard. If crashes are happening over and over again, those roads should be designed to make those crashes impossible.
This unspoken principal that there is some "acceptable level of death" on our roads needs to end. Is my life somehow less valuable when I'm crossing the street, vs. in a plane?
Again, these are all just general principals I'm suggesting. Lawyers would have to figure out specific enforcement measures, and whether they penalties should be financial, regulatory, or some other combination of measures.
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
Essentially we are trading road deaths for travel speed/level of service. If you do the math on what a life is worth, each life saved is worth on the order of $10m. City of Toronto has 60-70 road deaths per year. In other words, the value of the lives lost is about $650m per year. Would adding some traffic delays to improve safety cost more than the potential savings in life lost?
Our tolerance of road deaths makes me think of that saying, "one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic". If road deaths were rare like airplane deaths, we'd be horrified at the rare occasions where roadway deaths did occur. A single pedestrian death would be national news for a week. But dead road users are so common that their deaths are nothing but a stastic. We treat roadway death as an unfortunate of life, rather than what is is: an engineering decision we made as a society to value convenience over lives.
I hope future generations are horrified by our conventional attitudes towards roadway safety. I hope they find it unthinkable that anyone would ever designed roadway infrastructure, knowing these designs would lead to countless deaths.
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crs1026
Superstar
The road features that create risks may be generic or policy related rather than a physical design.
An example is, the policy that allows right turns on red lights.
Another example is wide arterial roads with generous speed limits that lack properly spaced crosswalks or controlled crossings.
The exact locations where incidents happen are a matter of wrong place, wrong time.... but these design policies are undoubtedly a contributing factor to fatalities.
It may be difficult (impossible?) to tease the contribution of the design to the incidents that happen. It t might not even be possible to adequately trend multiple incidents to identify that factor.....especially in a legal setting to the standard of proof required in court.
Part of me doesn't want to see this issue monetized at all. I don't dispute the reality that there is a huge monetary societal cost, but I hate to see any price put on a human life..... even if it's a large figure, it's going to be too low.
Having said that, the reality of our society is that we do collectively decide what level of risk we choose to put on an activity or technology versus the benefit we derive.....and we manage to that level. The risk levels we choose are rarely zero.
The debate over autonomous vehicles is a good example.... we know the technology will never be 100% safe, but we support its introduction because it promises to be far safer than continuing to allow people to do the driving. Pharmacology is another example.... people who point to the risk of drugs or vaccines aren't wrong.....the risk is non-zero, we are merely debating the risk level we will tolerate as individuals versus the gains we foresee.
So, yes I'm with you in spirit. I just think that continuing to win hearts and minds may be more practical and effective than a complicated incentive-disincentive scheme.
- Paul
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
Every single person that dies on our roads is someone that might've started a new business, improved their community or otherwise do something to make this world better. And when they die, so does all that potential. And for what? So another 10 cars can make a right turn per hour?
It's impossible to ever know what the true cost of this is. This road safety regime is a tragedy.
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
I'd argue that in virtually all other forms of engineering, our risk tolerance are reflections of our technological capabilities at the time. We now have the technologies to make buildings, electronics, planes and all kinds of other wonders that don't kill their users, and for that reason, we have a social expectation that these things should not kill their users.
It wasn't always like this. In the 50s, people would've been a lot more tolerant of airplane deaths, for example, because the technology at the time couldn't reasonably accommodate better safety standards. I could say the same about building standards in the 1850s. But as technology got better, we expected better, and many millions of lives have been saved as a result.
For some reason, that never happened with cars. We've long had the technology to build cars and roadways that don't kill people, yet our social expectations have not reflected that technological achievement.
So yes, it's true that risk levels we choose are never zero. But in the case of our roadways, the risk levels we've chosen is far higher than it should be, given our level of technological achievement. We can get it closer to zero.
I know we all support these principles (why else would we be here on a Friday night
), but I think this attitude that "everything has risks" is a dangerous one. While it's true, this attitude can too easily be used to argue that everything has risks, so there's no point in doing better. This line of thinking has been used to argue against virtually every proposed safety measure ever.I much prefer the attitude that zero road deaths are acceptable, and that every road death must be treated as a critical engineering/policy failure (which is precisely what it is).
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lenaitch
Senior Member
I get what you are saying, but it is disingenuous to say progress has never happened with vehicles and roadways. Back in the mid-1970s, the OPP alone dealt with approximately 1000 non-homicide deaths per year, the vast majority of which were vehicle collisions with a smattering of drownings and other manners of misadventure that might have added up to 100 or so. Year-to-date it is currently around 280 for highway fatalities. There are several factors behind this: better vehicle design, better highway design, improved emergency response such as extrication, etc. We might have the technology to build cars and roadways that don't kill people, but we have yet to find a way to design people that don't kill people.I'd argue that in virtually all other forms of engineering, our risk tolerance are reflections of our technological capabilities at the time. We now have the technologies to make buildings, electronics, planes and all kinds of other wonders that don't kill their users, and for that reason, we have a social expectation that these things should not kill their users.
It wasn't always like this. In the 50s, people would've been a lot more tolerant of airplane deaths, for example, because the technology at the time couldn't reasonably accommodate better safety standards. I could say the same about building standards in the 1850s. But as technology got better, we expected better, and many millions of lives have been saved as a result.
For some reason, that never happened with cars. We've long had the technology to build cars and roadways that don't kill people, yet our social expectations have not reflected that technological achievement.
So yes, it's true that risk levels we choose are never zero. But in the case of our roadways, the risk levels we've chosen is far higher than it should be, given our level of technological achievement. We can get it closer to zero.
I know we all support these principles (why else would we be here on a Friday night
I much prefer the attitude that zero road deaths are acceptable, and that every road death must be treated as a critical engineering/policy failure (which is precisely what it is).
Driving is a very populist activity that takes place in a public, shared space in a comparatively lightly regulated environment. To continue the aviation comparison, according to Transport Canada there were roughly 64,000 licenced pilots in Canada in 2011. According to Statistica, there are approximately 26 million drivers licence holders in Canada.
afransen
Senior Member
I think this kind of hand wringing is unpersuasive for policymakers.