This is a turning point in efforts to improve pedestrian safety and user coexistence on the roads. A first national demonstration demanding the securing of the surroundings of schools took place on Tuesday in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec. We are still far from the monster crowds that force public decision-makers to immediate action, but it is a start, necessary to hope for a change in mentalities and behaviors.
This demonstration launched by Piétons Québec stems from the death of the young Mariia Legenkovska, 7 years old, killed last December by a car while she was going to her school in the Centre-Sud district of Montreal. It coincides with the publication of new statistics, not very encouraging, by the Police Department of the City of Montreal.
The years of cocooning of the pandemic are behind us, and the toll of pedestrians injured in the streets of the metropolis is resuming its upward trend. In the first nine months of 2022, 39 pedestrians were seriously injured in road accidents, an increase of 56% compared to the same period last year. And 505 pedestrians suffered minor injuries, up 11.5%. In other words, the streets of Montreal cause two pedestrian injuries every day.
The problem goes beyond the borders of Montreal. Across Quebec, 36 pedestrians were killed on the road network in 2022, while the five-year average is 25.8 deaths. All types of fatal accidents combined, recklessness and speed are the main contributing factors, according to data collected on the territory of the Sûreté du Québec.
In addition to speed and recklessness, other factors explain this poor performance. The aging of the population accentuates the presence of fragile and vulnerable pedestrians in streets where the haste and impatience reign. The appetite of motorists for sport utility vehicles has the effect of leading to the proliferation of cars with large blind spots, which represents an increased risk for pedestrians when cornering. Developments (sidewalk overhangs, pedestrian crossings, time allowed for crossing, etc.) are not always designed for pedestrians, especially in the suburbs and in the countryside. In this respect, the Ministry of Transport appears to be an irreformable dunce: the roads and structures for which it is responsible are still designed by engineers from another century, for whom the range of interventions begins and ends at the traffic flow.
In the metropolitan agglomeration, an insidious phenomenon has been in constant progression for several years. The car fleet is growing faster than the population, while the road network is not expanding. The Mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, is one of the few elected officials who denounce this incongruity and who establish a causal link between the progression of the car fleet and the deterioration of pedestrian safety.
Going back is not an option. The city of tomorrow must belong to the citizens, and not to motorists, who still too often behave as if they had a right of precedence over the use of the road network over pedestrians and cyclists.
The lukewarmness of police surveillance, as evidenced by our report on Tuesday on the increase in road insecurity in Quebec, is not likely to encourage awareness by motorists. Prevention campaigns are certainly useful, but their effects are limited. As long as the car is so attractive, as long as the modal share of public transport continues to stagnate, these cohabitation problems which primarily affect cyclists and pedestrians will increase.
There are no magic, immediate solutions to these public safety challenges, but you have to start somewhere. The holding of a national forum where we would inquire about the best practices in use here as elsewhere in the world and where we would coordinate security strategies between the cities and the Quebec government could prove to be useful. There are enough yellow or red lights on the national dashboard to tackle this task.