Road safety proponent calls for Greater Sudbury to adopt Vision Zero approach

While the city of Greater Sudbury has made progress to make its roads safer, one safety proponent says the city could do more.

Valerie Smith, the director of road safety programs with Parachute Canada, a charitable organization dedicated to injury prevention, commended the city for efforts such as new red light cameras, separated bike lanes and other traffic calming measures.

But Smith said the city could take it a step further and adopt a Vision Zero policy.

Vision Zero is a strategy first adopted in Sweden in the 1990s to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries.

It achieves that by designing cities that manage speed and keep cyclists and pedestrians, who are most vulnerable on the roads, separate from vehicle traffic.

"Many of us really consider ourselves great drivers or attentive pedestrians," Smith said.

"We all make mistakes. And one of the key principles of Vision Zero is that no one should die or sustain serious injuries on our roads because of those mistakes."

Canadian cities such as Toronto and Edmonton have adopted the Vision Zero approach, and it's resulted in fewer serious injuries and fatalities, Smith said.

"As a mother of a 12-year-old, I do want to see our roads safer," Smith said.

"I want to see my daughter be able to ride her bike to school and do it safely."

More collisions this year

In Greater Sudbury there have been 25 per cent more collisions so far in 2022, than for the same period last year.

In 2021, the city's Collision Reporting Centre counted 2,941 collisions from Jan. 1 to Sept. 18. For the same time period in 2022, 3,684 collisions were reported to the centre.

Joe Rocca, the city's acting director of infrastructure and capital planning, said there were probably more collisions this year because there are more cars on the road.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021, many more people were working from home, which reduced road traffic.

But while there were more collisions this year, only a small number were fatal, or resulted in serious injuries.

Greater Sudbury Police said that in 2021 the traffic management unit responded to 31 serious or fatal collisions. So far this year, they've responded to 12 collisions.

Greater Sudbury Police Sgt. Blair Ramsay said high speeds are the most common cause of serious crashes.