Slow down, pay attention

In March, the Provincial Health Officer recommended that the speed limit in urban areas be lowered to 30 km/h from 50 km/h. Now, the B.C. Coroners Service has come out with recommendations that include using a “safe systems” approach for road design.

From the comments on the article that Castanet ran, you would think that people have the wrong idea of the reasoning behind it. That leads me to think that saying “safe systems” might get confused again.

The idea of reducing the speed limit is not targeted at lowering accident rate — people make mistakes and that’s a foregone conclusion. Though it would be nice if it also reduced the number of accidents since people would have more time to react to the rest of the traffic on the road.

The real reason for reducing the speed limit is to raise the odds that a pedestrian or cyclist involved in a crash with a car will survive.

“Survive” is the important word, because at the current speed limit, a person has a four times greater chance of dying. As a driver, do you want to risk killing someone enough to demand that you drive 50 km/h along Bernard Avenue or Ellis Street?

The Dutch were the first ones who started pursuing a “safe system” with cars, trucks and bikes. They looked at the psychology of road users and figured out how best to design roads to minimize the cost of mistakes.

New Zealand has been applying those same lessons since 2010 and even many U.S. states have embraced “Vision Zero,” which is a devotion to build the system to reduce traffic deaths to none.

People are fallible, there’s no question of that. The news agencies can’t go a day without reporting a collision. It doesn't matter whether they're between two cars or more or a bicycle and a car, there will be crashes.

As Kelowna grows, so will the number of people trying to get from point A to point B. Do we want to see more collisions? Do we want to see more stalled traffic clogging up Harvey Avenue?

Are we going to listen to the people who we pay to figure out solutions to the deaths that occur on the roads? Are we going to pay attention to officers who have looked at the data and realized the obvious conclusion?

When we run the numbers, driving the 765 metres from Richter to the Sails at 50 km/h will take approximately 55 seconds. That same piece of road at 30 km/h will take 90 seconds.

Is 35 seconds that important that you will risk killing someone?

Roads like Gordon, Harvey, Pandosy, Richter will stay the same. Local roads like Ellis and Bernard might slow down traffic for short sections.

Gasoline will get more and more expensive. Owning a car will become more of a burden that not all people will see as important, and they’ll use a bicycle. The provincial government has already said bicycles and cars will share the roads. 

City staff are the ones in the hot seat to see that we don’t kill each other.

Let’s do our part and tell our councillors and city staff that we want a safe Kelowna, that we want to get around town without killing each other, that we can exercise patience.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.