The City of Delta and its police department receive numerous complaints about neighbourhood traffic safety and how to manage them will be part of a new comprehensive plan.
Council at its Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday (May 2) heard a presentation from a consultant and Delta Police Chief Neil Dubord on the next steps for Delta to formulate its own Vision Zero strategy, aimed at eliminating all traffic-related fatalities and severe injuries by making communities safer for all modes of transportation.
Several cities such as Vancouver, Surrey and Toronto have already adopted their own Vision Zero strategies in recent years.
Council was told that since 2016, on average, 22 people are killed or seriously injured on Delta roads.
Some of the other stats presented included 65 per cent of all collisions are occurring at intersections while heavy trucks, despite accounting for just three per cent of vehicular traffic, account for 12 per cent of accidents involving someone being killed or seriously injured.
Vision Zero will hopefully reduce that number, as well as improve connections to schools and community services and address the needs of older adults and vulnerable road users.
The city is to develop a holistic and strategic road safety approach, which includes stakeholders and community partners. The city has begun undertaking community outreach and engagement and will put together a special stakeholder group.
A new plan is to be approved for implementation by 2024.
The plan, which would prioritize high-crash locations, will have several elements from road design, speed reduction, enforcement and education.
Already being examined are “quick wins” such as curb bulges to reduce speeds, but such measures don’t always work in every location, said Shabnem Afzal, Principal, Shabnem Afzal Public Safety Inc.
Noting the city has already been undertaking safety enhancements though such initiatives as neighbourhood roads improvements projects, engineering director Steven Lan also made a presentation to go over some of the additional measures that can be undertaken, including updating neighbourhood traffic calming plans, installing speed humps and cushions around schools zones, as well as continuing to implement sidewalk projects and the cycling master plan.
He noted the city receives many requests for traffic calming measures such as speed humps, but the right solutions should be implemented for neighbourhoods in a data-driven plan.
Dubord also said police deal with many calls from neighbourhoods where there is a perception of traffic safety problems, such as persistent excess speeding, but that’s not what is necessarily the reality.
However, they must still deal with all concerns raised, while also prioritizing the high-crash locations, he said.
“I think through a neighbourhood planning approach that has a committee and policy, and then associated actions and recommendations, I think we can, hopefully, accomplish both those goals. So, we can continue to focus on high-collision locations, which have serious injuries and fatalities, but at the same time deal with local issues that often are the majority of the calls that we receive into our offices, creating that equitable distribution of resources for both the city departments and the police department as well,” Dubord added.
