Prepared by:
AECOM Canada Ltd.
In Association with:
CIMA+ and Lund University
Prepared for:
Transport Canada, Motor Vehicle Safety Directorate
Executive Summary
According to 2005 Annual Report on Road Safety Vision 2010 Canadians are among the most mobile people in the world. Unfortunately, this level of mobility has come with a price. During 2006, the most recent year for which traffic collision data are available, according to Road Safety Vision annual report, 2,889 road users were killed and about 200,000 were injured (Transport Canada, 2006). Despite the fact that during the past 20 years road transportation deaths and serious injuries have been halved on a per unit of population basis, traffic collisions have remained one of the leading contributors to years of lost life among Canadians - accounting for more than 94% of fatalities and 99% of serious injuries in transportation-related occurrences according to the same report. The annual economic cost to Canadian society, due to fatal and injury traffic collisions, is estimated at $63 billion (Transport Canada, 2007).
In October 2000 Canada officially approved its second national road safety plan; Road Safety Vision 2010. The goal of Road Safety Vision 2010 is to make Canada’s roads the safest in the world. The initiative has set an ambitious national target calling for a 30% decrease in the average number of road users killed or seriously injured during the 2008-2010 period, as compared with 1996-2001 average figures. Also in this initiative, there are some sub-targets addressing areas such as occupant restraint use, impaired driving, rural road safety, intersection and speed-related collisions, commercial vehicle safety, young drivers, and vulnerable road users.
It is well known that rural road safety, intersection and speed-related collisions, collisions involving vulnerable road users, and commercial vehicle safety would greatly benefit from the implementation of road engineering safety countermeasures. While the majority of effective countermeasures being implemented in Canada are well documented and readily available to Canadian practitioners, there still appears to be a knowledge gap with respect to many countermeasures that have been implemented in other top-ranked member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in support of their national road safety plans. Often the related information remains fragmented, scattered, under-evaluated and not readily available to practitioners in Canada. Therefore in order to further support the implementation of Canada Road Safety Vision 2010, Transport Canada decided to retain Synectics Transportation Consultants Inc. to identify such countermeasures, to evaluate their relevance to the vision and to asses their respective applicability to Canadian conditions.
This research is mainly dedicated to finding countermeasures from other OECD countries that have the potential to be transferred to Canadian applications, provided that they are not already well known to the Canadian road engineering community and have not been widely implemented in Canada. It has also been decided to further include countermeasures that are highly successful in OECD countries, which are well known in Canada, but have yet to be implemented due to reasons not related to safety. This was done in hopes that including such countermeasures may facilitate a fresh look, and may prompt new ideas among Canadian practitioners, on how such countermeasures could be successfully implemented in Canada.
An extensive literature search and agency contact has been conducted. All collected material was reviewed and a considerable amount of efforts were put to compile descriptions of countermeasures with illustrations and their known safety effects followed by a discussion of their safety effects, different aspects of design, implementation, public acceptance, costs, environmental impacts, etc. Also in parallel to the literature search, some selected agencies were contacted as needed to identify and obtain all related published and unpublished materials containing information on the most successful countermeasures introduced in the respondent’s respective country.
Based on the results of the literature search, review, and agency contact, the study team has compiled a long list of countermeasures in a matrix format, as shown in Appendix B of this report, which contains a countermeasure name, concise description, and general evaluation criteria as defined above. Also in order to select the most efficient countermeasures, some general evaluation criteria has been established and applied to each countermeasure in the long list. General evaluation criteria includes collision reduction, capital cost of countermeasure, maintenance and operating costs, susceptibility (to weather, salt, humidity etc), public acceptance, policy maker acceptance, sustainability, and other factors such as possible effect on the greenhouse gas emissions and synergy with other road safety initiatives such as education and enforcement. The range of costs is somewhat variable and even unavailable for some of the selected measures. However following the compilation of list of selected countermeasures, based on the available data and expert judgments, the measures fell into three categories with respect to their capital cost, namely, low-, medium- and high-cost.
Furthermore for each and every selected countermeasure in each category, some Canadian-specific considerations were provided followed by some recommendations for use in Canada. The Canadian-specific considerations include the following:
- Compatibility to current legislation in Canada;
- Compatibility to current design and construction standards, guidelines, and manuals;
- Sufficiency of existing road safety knowledge in Canada;
- Suitability to Canadian geography and climate;
- Suitability to Canadian-specific vehicle fleet, traffic volumes, driving/behavioral patterns;
- Confidence that the application of the countermeasure will not incur an increase in cost/affordability due to the differences between Canada and other OECD countries;
- Anticipated acceptance by decision makers;
- Anticipated public acceptance; and
- Anticipated performance towards achieving targets of Canada Road Safety Vision 2010.
It should be noted that quantitative measures were unavailable for a large number of countermeasures investigated, obstructing the use of a single assessment metric. As such, through this project, evaluations partly involved deductive assessment, integrating information from the literature review, agency contact, and the experience and knowledge of the expert study team. Eventually, some of the selected countermeasures were identified for immediate implementation where justified such as gateways, safety edge, freeway median cable barrier systems, etc.
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