Allison Hanes: We need to get serious about road safety to protect our children
Will a slew of new municipal and provincial road safety measures around schools finally teach drivers to slow down?
Allison Hanes • Montreal Gazette
Published Sep 07, 2023 • Last updated 17 hours ago • 4 minute read
Children in the Montreal area are becoming living speed cameras as a way to get drivers to slow down in school zones. A police officer stands by as a child with a backpack is equipped with a readout showing drivers’ speeds, in a Friday, June 30, 2023, handout photo. The Canadian Press
It didn’t take long, sadly, before Quebec recorded its first pedestrian casualty since kids across the province returned to school last week.
A six-year-old girl in suburban Quebec City was struck by a vehicle Wednesday morning. Although she suffered a head injury, local police reported that they don’t fear for her life.
Heave a sigh of relief. It was another close call as more attention is finally being paid to road safety.
New pencils, new erasers and new books have long been staples of back-to-school preparations. But this year there are also new speed limits, new radar traps and new investments by municipalities and the province alike to secure school zones.
A Ukrainian refugee, killed by a car on her way to school in Ville-Marie borough last December, highlighted the unacceptably high pedestrian death toll in Montreal — and underscored the vulnerability of children in particular. Mariia Legenkovska’s heartbreaking death prompted the city to swiftly introduce a flurry of new safety measures to address long-standing dangers in the neighbourhood where she lived.
Otherwise the bricks and mortar city-scaping that are among the means necessary to protect pedestrians (but slow to materialize given the limited time and money it takes to complete) remain a work in progress.
Mayor Valérie Plante stood outside a school in the Sud-Ouest this week to announce $10 million for 30 projects in 11 boroughs to widen sidewalks, install speed bumps and augment pedestrian crossings to ensure students who walk can make it to class safely. These are all positive steps, to be sure, but there are hundreds of schools in the city, each waiting to climb the priority list — without experiencing the kind of tragedy that might catapult them to the top.
Upping the ante, the South Shore city of St-Lambert dropped speed limits in school zones to 20 kilometres per hour compared to 30 km/h in Montreal and most other places. It’s a strong statement of intent, but will it make a difference? Recent data shared by the Quebec association of police chiefs revealed 71 per cent of drivers speed around schools and parks anyway.
Quebec Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault recently announced $180 million over five years to adopt the Vision Zero concept, with a special focus on school zones. After an alarming increase in traffic deaths last year, the government had been under pressure to get tough.
But how seriously can we take a minister who doesn’t wear her seatbelt? Her own office posted photos on social media of Guilbault working in her chauffeured government limousine without her safety belt, a lapse that caught the eye of Le Journal de Montreal. Oops.
It doesn’t bode well if the person in charge of reversing deadly traffic trends is so clueless about a basic live-saving road safety habit. Apology aside, she now lacks the moral authority to enact steeper fines for highway code violations under Quebec’s sweeping new plan.
Bringing in stiffer rules and penalties, however, is meaningless without enforcement. Montreal police are trying a new tactic to curb speeding in school zones. They’re enlisting children wearing special “backpacks” with a screen that flashes a passing motorist’s speed, as registered by a supervising cop’s radar gun. The idea is to try to put a human face (or back of the head, as the case may be) on safety. It’s gimmicky, but, hey, whatever it takes to get folks behind the wheel to stop ignoring the pint-size pedestrians around schools. With four backpacks, however, police can’t be everywhere at once, so will it be enough to alter attitudes?
Citizens groups are also taking matters into their own hands.
Pas une mort de plus, along with the English Parents’ Committee Association of Quebec, tried tugging at heartstrings by encouraging communities to create hand-drawn safety posters for school zones. If the official signage is a blur, maybe a child’s artwork will catch their attention.
And on Wednesday, the Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal (CEUM), along with l’École de santé publique de l’Université de Montréal and the Centre de recherche en santé publique, offered up a toolbox of measures to help schools, parents and volunteers tame traffic around schools themselves. More kids should be encouraged to walk to class for the health and environmental benefits — without taking their lives into their hands.
The lesson that Legenkovska’s death should have taught us (but that everyone will forget in the case of the Quebec City girl who mercifully survived her near miss) is that we should concern ourselves with the safety of every child heading to school as if they were our own.