Since the tragic death of a schoolgirl at the corner of Parthenais and de Rouen streets and the overthrow of the school crossing guard in Ahuntsic-Cartierville, voices have been raised everywhere to demand changes to road safety codes and urban development around schools. Demonstrations are organized to demand concrete actions from the Quebec government and cities.
However, this is not the first time that such tragedies have occurred in Montreal and Quebec. We have been calling for major changes in this area for years. We repeat the same words: one death more is one death too many. In vain. The Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec recorded, between 2012 and 2018, an average of six collisions per day in “school zones”. You read correctly. This is an absolutely catastrophic figure.
When elected officials do something concrete to fight against this scourge, loud cries are quickly heard on social networks and in the media to denounce a speech and actions to which we immediately attach the label “anti-cars”. Just think of strategies like “Vision Zero Fatalities and Serious Injuries” on the road. How many times have I heard the sarcasm of the proponents of immobility mocking these approaches by reducing them to “zero vision” strategies!
As mayor, I personally suffered this kind of wrath when I implemented measures to secure all schools in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. What is less talked about, however, are the thanks from parents and the school community that followed.
Make no mistake about it, elected officials who dare to raise their voices for pedestrians are not against cars. Everywhere, these are for facilities that protect the most vulnerable on public roads. They are for cities that put people back at the heart of their development. This is the real challenge of this new paradigm which inevitably leads to changes in our lifestyles. Inevitably, any impact on our habits produces legitimate resistance to change.
The same is true on the roads. Because road safety issues are first and foremost a question of human behavior. Elected officials will be able to spend millions on safe urban developments, as long as the behavior of different road users does not change, there will still be pedestrians who will be hit.
Certainly, safe arrangements reduce the risk of collision. The automotive fluidity constraints that have been implemented have proven their effectiveness. Police interventions on the ground also have a role to play, as do public authorities. In this regard, we are no longer in the age of awareness, but of penalties for bad behavior of all kinds.
What more can you do, if not install more traffic calming measures, you might say? What if we asked the question differently? How to ensure that the school takes on greater value in the dynamics and life of the neighbourhoods? Not only as school and educational services, but as a living space for the children who frequent it.
If we put the school at the heart of living environments, as we did with the church or the credit union, the school would become a place that brings people together, capable of creating a sense of identity within the community. The child would then be at the center of our concerns.
There are already great initiatives in this direction that mobilize parents and school communities. For example, in some neighborhoods there are trottibuses. Carried by the Canadian Cancer Society, they allow children to walk in groups to school under the supervision of volunteer parents. “Street-school” projects are also good examples to follow. The characteristic of these arrangements is to allow a school community to completely or partially close the school street to automobile traffic during the hours of class entry and exit.
We could also set up citizen projects for playful corridors to school or the closing of complete streets through participatory development projects intended for children, such as L’île aux volcans in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. The central idea is to review the use and layout of public space by putting the child at the center of all our concerns. Equally crucial is the idea of enabling communities to fully participate in the vision and implementation of traffic calming projects.
These examples demonstrate that parents and communities can step up and change the dynamics of a child’s journey to school. Above all, they remind us that it is not only up to the public actor to act to guarantee the safety of schoolchildren. Especially since, sometimes, excessive appeasement measures can cool the will of certain elected officials whose shell is thinner in the face of criticism from all-by-the-car.
We must put the school at the heart of neighborhood life in order to change mentalities, facilitate the social acceptability of the constraints that this entails and reverse the bad trend started since the 1970s. It is by taking charge that local authorities can go further. For this to work, elected officials must share power with citizens. Because more children going to school alone means more healthy children in a more friendly living environment.