It’s a systematic stop in the middle of my running circuit: in front of the monument to Sir George-Étienne Cartier, at the corner of Duluth Ouest and du Parc avenues, I hop on the spot while waiting for the pedestrian light, for a moment respite before heading down the trails of Mount Royal. Each time, without fail, I read and reread the vignette hanging on a pole to pay tribute to Concepción Cortacans, a jogger mowed down there by an inattentive SUV driver in January 2016.
A burnt red light, a violent impact, the victim was thrown several meters. No signs of braking on the road, said the police report. The 62-year-old woman succumbed to her injuries a week after the accident in hospital. The driver was fined $1,000 and received four demerit points. You will certainly not read me appealing for harsher sentences, you know my dislike for retribution as an instrument of justice. Still, the contrast here is striking.
This tragedy had given rise to a shower of criticism relating to the dangerousness of this intersection in particular: a pedestrian crossing that was not very visible, an area where motorists often drove at an unreasonable speed… The case, all the same, had a bit of noise, prompting the City of Montreal to accelerate the deployment, starting in 2018, of the “Vision Zero” approach, which aims to eliminate serious and fatal traffic accidents by 2040.
Since then, we have stayed the course, and the most recent data from the City seem to indicate some progress: the number of pedestrians seriously injured or killed has been falling since 2019. However, we are still a long way from the “zero” objective. , since every 41 hours, someone dies or is seriously injured in a traffic accident on Montreal territory.
The 2020 data also indicates that 85% of these collisions occurred at intersections where there had not been an incident of comparable severity in the previous five years. The unpredictability of incidents suggests that the nature of the problem is structural, not just circumstantial. In other words, it may not be enough to secure so-called “accident-prone” intersections to achieve the objective cherished by Vision Zero.
It may be impossible to give substance to the idea that it is unacceptable for people to be killed or seriously injured when they move on the network without fundamentally transforming the way we approach the sharing of road between the most dangerous and the most vulnerable road users.
The power relations ordered by the economy of road dangerousness are, moreover, a formidable metaphor for the organization of social relations. This is what seems to have escaped a recent awareness campaign aimed at pedestrians prepared by the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal.
Posters posted at 42 accident-prone intersections remind pedestrians to look both ways before crossing, even when the little guy appears; to enter the lane only if there is enough time to cross; to wait when the red hand is displayed; Obey traffic lights…
The infantilizing nature of the campaign did not escape anyone, as did the irony of calling the most vulnerable road users to order when it is enough to walk from time to time in the streets of Montreal to know that basic safety gestures can do nothing against the recklessness and arrogance of too many motorists.
It has already been said a lot, and going back to the terms of the cultural war which aims to oppose motorists to other road users does not interest me much. Still, the problem, obviously, is not on the side of pedestrians. While most people are able to recognize this, no one seems ready to take responsibility.
Indeed, an information sheet on sharing the road published by the SAAQ in 2021 listed that only 50% of the population believes that Quebec motorists are respectful of pedestrians. On the other hand, almost all of the people surveyed considered themselves to have exemplary behavior.
Nobody’s fault, then? Not so crazy to believe it. I would even dare to say that the discourse on individual prudence and courtesy does not change much if we neglect to question the absolute primacy accorded to the car in the urban space. Let’s dare to name things: beyond everyone’s goodwill, the city organized for the individual car creates an environment that is globally more violent and more hostile to human life.
Before even addressing the question of dangerousness, it suffices to note the effect of road infrastructures on the habitability of cities. For example, and this was mentioned recently in the pages of the To have to, parking lots, asphalt, create heat islands, and car traffic would generate up to a third of the heat of anthropogenic origin in the city. Conversely, while these days we are packing up the pedestrian facilities on Mont-Royal Avenue, we can clearly see that a whole world of possibilities is born when we return part of the roadway to the community.
Safety and convenience often go hand in hand, and if you over-emphasize the importance of looking-both-ways-before-crossing, you end up losing sight of the horizon.