A warning out to B.C. drivers Wednesday to slow down and be aware of their surroundings, as more pedestrians and cyclists head out this spring
As the weather warms up and more folks take to the great outdoors – cyclists, pedestrians, and scooter users are faced with real risks on B.C. roads.
New footage from ICBC released Wednesday shows just a snapshot of some of the challenges faced by non-drivers at busy intersections, with some drivers failing to yield or rolling through crosswalks.
“We know that the majority of collisions involving pedestrians and cyclists with vehicles happen at intersections, over 70 per cent of these crashes happen at our intersections and on average nearly 4,000 pedestrians and cyclists are injured every year in B.C.,” said Greg Harper, ICBC Communications.
It has the Crown corporation calling for motorists to slow down and take extra precautions when driving this summer and while an advocacy group dedicated to ending fatalities and serious injuries on Metro Vancouver roads says it’s a message they can get behind.
Vision Zero Vancouver also says more needs to be done.
“The majority of these injuries and fatalities happen at intersections and there’s changes that we can make in those intersections, things like banning right turns on red lights and making sure that anytime there is a pedestrian walk signal – that walk signal comes on before the light goes green to give pedestrians a head start to cross the road,” said Haakon Koyote, Vision Zero Vancouver volunteer.
ICBC says it has invested $4.7 million in road safety improvement over the past five years, which includes pedestrian signals, flashing beacons and multi-use pathways.
“In all, I believe its around 240 million we’ve invested over the last 35 years in road safety and these are to fund projects all over the province, maybe it’s a roundabout that’s being installed maybe it’s improvements to a crosswalk, maybe its concreate medians that are being installed all sorts of things – it all leads to the ultimate goal for us which is to reduce the number of crashes that take place throughout our province,” said Harper.
However, Vision Zero hopes that additional investments can be made to create safer environments for vulnerable road users.
“We really at Vision Zero want them to put their money where their mouth is and actually invest more money in making sure that it is safe for everybody on the roads, and the fact that they even have to make this message proves the point that they haven’t done that yet,” said Koyote.