Who's safe on Hamilton streets? Recent crashes involving pedestrians highlight work to be done

As the city takes public input on its complete streets manual, advocates say the "urgent situation" of pedestrian safety in a car-focused city needs to be addressed quickly, following two serious collisions between vehicles and elderly pedestrians over the past two weeks.

"People are literally losing their lives on the street," says Brody Robinmeyer, project manager of Friendly Streets for Black, Indigenous and Racialized Communities at Environment Hamilton. "Hearing about these accidents with elderly people, and people with mobility issues, I believe it's an urgent situation."

On Saturday, a man in his seventies was in critical condition after being hit by a vehicle while crossing the street near Upper James and Fennell Avenue. Last week, a hit-and-run driver killed a 70-year-old man and his dog on Lawrence Road, west of the Red Hill Valley Parkway.

The recent collisions are the latest of others involvingolder pedestrians on Hamilton's roads.

• In January, a 71-year-old man died after being hit by a school bus in December;
• In October, an 86-year-old woman died after being hit by an SUV in Stoney Creek;
• Just days earlier, a 65-year-old using a mobility scooter was killed by a dump truck near the Hamilton General Hospital; and
• In January 2021, an 81-year-old man died while attempting to cross Main Street East "without the right of way," near Tisdale Street South.

Robinmeyer says he's heard from older and disabled people whose ability to move around the city is stifled by fears for their safety while doing things that should be routine, such as crossing the street.

He says those concerns are exacerbated in winter by the lack of adequate snow clearing on sidewalks and crosswalks, adding the sheer number of people with mobility challenges of various kinds should be enough to make pedestrian safety more of a priority.

"A significant amount of our fellows are experiencing this," he told CBC Hamilton. "There's an awful lot of focus, and space, given towards automotive users."

His organization hopes to help the city identify unsafe places for pedestrians with its Friendly Streets reporting tool, which asks citizens to crowd-source areas in their neighbourhood that could use safety upgrades, such as bump-outs, crosswalks or new stop signs.

Improving sidewalks

"The hope is that if we have it all in one place, we have [potential solutions] to share," he said.

CBC Hamilton was unable to get pedestrian fatality statistics for 2021 from Hamilton police or the city. The city's 2020 collision report says there were four pedestrians killed that year, out of 192 collisions between vehicles and people on foot.

The report says that "in 25.8 per cent of pedestrian collisions at midblocks[non-intersection locations], pedestrians were walking on road shoulders or sidewalks. This observation can potentially be used to add or improve sidewalks."

The report also said pedestrians crossing where there is no crosswalk is a significant factor in collisions.

More crosswalks, bike lanes and safety buffers between traffic and pedestrians appear to be in Hamilton's future, with new street templates currently being developed by the city's planning department meant to "shift away from traditional design that prioritizes the movement of motor vehicles," according to the city's website.

Public input on Complete Streets plan open

Set to come before council in the spring, the city's Complete, Livable, Better Streets Design Manual will provide guidelines that "encourage designs that better balance considerations for the different transportation modes that share streets [and] focus on enhancing road safety.

"Typical design features include speed management, enhancing crossing treatments, managing the various demands for the use of curbside space, allocating space for active transportation and adding streetscaping elements such as seating, lighting and trees. The application of an 'all ages and abilities lens' is also an important component of CLB Streets."

The city's director of transportation planning, Brian Hollingworth, says these elements are already going into current street planning and design, but the new manual will help formalize best practices and decision criteria. The new process will be "less about one person's opinion over another about what's best," he told CBC Hamilton.

"The goal is to outline key design concepts that are most likely to accelerate our progress to complete streets," he said. "In my view, every project is an opportunity for a complete street, whether a road resurfacing or a water main replacement."

Hamiltonians can provide input on the draft designs until Feb. 18.

'Reduce the need for car trips'

In Hamilton's North End, community members have been working for years to make streets safer for pedestrians, says Jon Davey, chair of North End Neighbourhood Association's Environment and Climate Change committee. The neighbourhood has a 30 kilometre-per-hour speed limit and unique traffic calming features such a bump-outs curbed sections that make the street more narrow in certain places to force vehicles to slow down.

Davey says resident opposition stopped the bump-outs from being installed in the eastern half of the neighbourhood, which opted for speed bumps instead. He says since they were installed, however, traffic in the western section has beennotably slower.

"Drivers really slow down when they feel like their car is going to be scratched," he said.

Davey says another big win for pedestrians in the area was the John Street North bike lane, which was installed in recent years. He says before that, the two-lane, one-way street felt like an unsafe place to walk with a child due to the speed of the cars passing through. Now there's just one through lane for traffic, and the bike lane acts as a buffer between pedestrians and the street.

Daveyalso says he sees a fortuitous connection between safer streets and lower carbon emissions: both are achieved by reducing car use. The next step he'd like to see in the North End and beyond is increased public transit. He's already helped the neighbourhood association petition Coun. Jason Farr for a bus route directly intoBayfront Park, and says he'd like to see a day where buses run down Ferguson and Wellington Streets as well.

He says many of the association's members are primarily concerned with building height, traffic, and parking in the fast-growing neighbourhood, which is set for rapid development with the Pier 8 neighbourhood currently under construction.

'Fast, furious and stupid'

"Public transit can solve two of those three concerns," he said. "I'm trying to suggest we need to really start pushing the city towards making use of public transit really so we reduce the need for car trips."

Further east, where the fatal hit-and-run occurred recently, Ward 4 Coun. Sam Merulla says, broadly speaking, that while the city works toreducespeeds and addcrosswalks, there has also been a growing culture of irresponsible driving and street racing that has been hard to tamp down.

"I call it the fast, furious and stupid mentality," he told CBC Hamilton. "We can't eliminate that behaviour."

He'd like to see increased use of photo radar on city streets, with the goal of slowing cars down.

"We can never have enough," said Merulla."If every street had photo radar, I can assure you, people wouldn't be speeding [and]those speed reductions normally correlate to safer pedestrian traffic."