Highway Safety or Road User Safety? The discussion left the road due to distraction

It's Time to Change the Conversation

Road user safety on our Northern highways is an important concern, and watching the conversations unfold in recent months has been very instructive...and deeply disturbing. With a complete absence of any future vision that would be healthy, sustainable, equitable, far less costly to drivers and taxpayers, and safe the entire conversation has become distracted and veered off topic.

With a total length for highways 11 and 17 of 3600 km, and with 3270 crashes per year, that gives the highways a crash rate of 0.91 crashes per kilometre of road. That's concerning.

Let's begin with the cause of collisions, because any future vision must provide solutions to current problems without creating new problems.

In simple terms, driver error is the proximate cause of all collisions. Official documents, such as the Canadian Motor Vehicle Traffic Collision Statistics and the Ontario Road Safety Annual reports, and regular OPP communications consistently illustrate that the incredible level of road violence that we have normalised is caused by driver error. In addition, there's a wealth of scientific literature exposing the same cause.

Let's list the reasons why again:

1. speed

2. aggression/impatience

3. distraction

4. impairment

5. fatigue

6. not driving for the conditions

It's shocking how often people complain about poor driver behaviour, but then when they talk about road user safety, forget the simple fact that driver error is the cause of all collisions.

Unlike urban roads that can be designed to generate safe driver behaviour, highways can only rely on forgiving design for the inevitable crashes because the purpose of highways is movement over long distances, and that often involves high velocities. This is also why any action, as with urban roads, to increase road space, efficiency, convenience or otherwise reduce risk perception will only make matters worse and increase crashes.

If we want to actually improve road user safety, more 'roads' are simply not the answer because that only amplifies driver errors.

As counterintuitive as it may sound to some, fewer roads and drivers would get us far further and much faster towards a safer transportation system.

But so far, almost every suggestion has been framed to do just the exact opposite of what is needed, and there is a black hole sucking any discussion about actually improving road user safety out of the entire public discourse.

Here is a list of suggestions to improve road user safety and save lives on Northern Ontario highways if that indeed is the goal. Keep in mind, none of these suggestion reduce access or mobility. In fact, they all expand access and mobility:

1. Provide citizens with options for movement:

   1. expand public transport, such as rail, by fairly (or better yet, equitably) reallocating public transportation funding towards the public good – not just roads for private interests. Excellent public transportation that is frequent, fast, reliable, safe, fare-free and comfortable, and weather-proof, supported by other techniques to make alternatives to automobility the default and preferred choice. Like other countries do.

   2. construct a year round, off road, grade separated and protected non-motorised parallel mobility route. Like other countries do.

2. Reduce highway speeds through better infrastructure design paired with technological enforcement, not signage alone, and improve forgiving design for when an inevitable crash does happen. The 2 plus 1 or other road widening schemes are not forgiving design – those are road expansions. Forgiving design is design that is intended to absorb and lessen the impact of inevitable crashes (such as the removal of trees alongside highways in excess of that needed for clear sight lines). Specifically, forgiving design should not increase automobility or motornormativity, or reduce risk perception, by widening the driving portions of highways or otherwise increasing excessive entitlement and normalising aggressive driving. Remember, there are rightly no minimum speed limits, and so when you're experiencing impatience or frustrations with a slower driver, you're displaying aggressive tendencies towards – and that place at risk – other road users that may cause you to behave in a manner that neglects “due care and attention or reasonable consideration for other persons using the highway “. No crash is an “accident”. Collisions are all predictable and preventable if drivers only respect other road users.

3. Properly cost roads for users: charge road user tolls to maintain the highways and generate an investment stream for public transportation options. Tolls based on speed and weight of vehicles, electronically administered and managed, that cover such costs as emergency services, healthcare, pollution, GHG emissions and other societal and health costs.

4. Mandate annual testing for all drivers at full-cost recovery, not only truck drivers and commercial vehicle operators, to rigorous standards, not rubber stamps. Driving is a privilege and an individual choice, and a service for drivers; not a public service, but a public risk.

5. Lease (more) public roads including highways 11 and 17 to the private sector to manage, and regulatethese third parties strongly for safety, using the public revenues for public transportation that is more convenient than private automobility in terms of times, frequencies, and comfort – establish lease agreements that fund public transportation services, and let the private sector determine toll rates that best accommodate market conditions – public transportation excluded from tolls of course.

6. Get freight and trucks off the highways by charging the costs accordingly, and providing a level playing field to allow modal decisions based on sound cost accounting while the market better signals the internalisation of currently externalised costs, such as pollution, crashes and unfair labour practices. Local distribution of freight can be governed by similar regulations, prompting greater electrification and cost efficiencies within urban areas. Truck drivers can provide their essential last mile service while delivering closer to home and families in a safe environment.

7. Get mobile devices out of the passenger compartment of vehicles – driving distracted is seven times as likely to cause a crash than is driving impaired. If an open bottle of alcohol is illegal in passenger compartments, and a criminal offence, why are we giving a free pass to mobile devices? Mobile devices in a running or moving vehicle should be equally treated as a criminal offence. Ah ah ah ah ah...distracted kids is a convenience that unfairly promotes excessive automobility. Put them and their devices on public transit if you feel so inclined. Tech companies can play an important role to prevent mobile devices from operating when a vehicle is turned on. 911 services could be excluded. No police enforcement required. Your vehicle is not a mobile office or entertainment theatre while it's moving – multitasking is a dangerous myth.

8. Consider some of the obvious and ridiculously simple actions like making passing on a double centre line illegal through proper road design, such as the use of concrete barriers with wildlife corridors, which would have the added benefit of increasing risk perception for drivers through the appearance of a narrower space, self-reinforcing good driver behaviour

9. Start deducting 'bads' from economic growth instead of always adding them to the positive side of the ledger. The last 50 years have largely been characterised by 'uneconomic' growth – growth that harms society more than it benefits. Highway crashes are just one example of this biased accounting practice – the emergency vehicles and responders, lawyers and court time, police patrols and enforcement, repair shops and healthcrae services and therapy, and rising insurance costs caused by crashes are all apparently good for the GDP. That practice needs to stop. This step should help improve poor public policy and cull the political rhetoric that 'highways are dangerous' once and for all. Drivers are dangerous. Count drivers and driving properly as a liability; not a public revenue stream.

Above all, design the highways as they were intended: as a collective benefit for all to enjoy

Wider roads or changes that make driving more convenient, comfortable, efficient or appear less risky will always generate or amplify unsafe driver behaviour and therefore unsafe road user conditions. If you've been on a 400 series highway recently, you know what we mean. Although this may seem counterintuitive to some, expanding roads is always, and always has been, counterproductive, whether the excuse to do so is attributed to safety, traffic volumes, congestion, or pollution.

If in doubt, check road collision statistics. Remember that crash rate for highways 11 and 17 at the beginning of this blog as 0.91 per kilometre of road? In southern Ontario, it's different. On the 2000 kilometres of 400 series highways in Ontario (half the length as for Northern Ontario), there's a whopping 8,700 crashes a year, or a crash rate of 4.35 per kilometre. That's almost five times as high as for Northern Ontario highways!

Let's not introduce that here! More road only induces more irrational and error-prone drivers.

Multi-lane highways are not safer. In fact, they are five times less safe in Ontario. So please let's end this talk about building more highway when we know it's far more dangerous for road users, costly for drivers and taxpayers, unhealthy, less sustainable and less equitable. There are far better solutions.

Expanding automobility is only beneficial to automobile sector investors.

After all, expanding roads is what we've been doing for the last century to get us into this 'situation'.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is simply irrational foolishness.

As is most of the last months and years conversation around 'road safety' on Northern Ontario highways.

Can we just put those nonsensical narratives about dangerous roads to bed already and have a rational conversation about mobility that is healthy, sustainable, equitable, far less costly to drivers and taxpayers, and safe please? And then discuss modal options that are safer than the socially unsafe practice of driving and motor vehicle use?

When drivers say they have little choice but to drive the roads, that lack of choice is the bottleneck in safer road user conditions.