Halifax partners with DalTRAC to assess how citizens use streets, sidewalks

We’ve all been taught to look both ways before you cross the street. Now, the city of Halifax, partnered with the Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory (or DalTRAC), is asking average citizens to look at how crosswalks are working in their neighbourhoods, and share them with the policy makers who are working on building a better, safer road space in the city.

Ahsan Habib is a transportation professor at Dalhousie University, as well as the director of DalTRAC. What is DalTRAC, you ask?

“DalTRAC is a transportation research unit within Dalhousie University,” says Habib. “We do all types of transportation research, like behaviour, network, and road safety is one of our focuses as well – trying to understand why collisions are happening, and try to understand collision patterns.”

One of DalTRAC’s ongoing projects for the past two years is the Share the Road initiative, which is a project funded with the help of the Nova Scotia Department of Energy to raise awareness of how pedestrians and drivers can better and more safely share our roads.

The old adage is that the pedestrian has the right of way, but in this discussion, both parties have an equal role to play going forward, according to Habib.

“It’s shared, to be honest — 45 per cent of drivers are at fault, but on the other case, 38 [per cent] is actually pedestrian. So it’s a shared responsibility,” says Habib. “Both types of user need to be quite vigilant when they’re interacting in the road space.”

One of the ways DalTRAC recently tried to facilitate this discussion, and raise awareness of the new 2015-16 Pedestrian Safety Action Plan brought brought before and approved by the city council on Feb. 3, was by hosting an ‘information cafe’ public information session on crosswalk safety.

This information cafe brought interested citizens one-on-one with the policy makers and policy enforcers on the subject of crosswalk safety, and gave them the chance not just to hear what these experts had to say, but also pitch in their two cents as well.

“The plan itself speaks to various initiatives that staff are going to be working on for the upcoming year, including elements of engineering, education, enforcement, and evaluations,” says Taso Koutroulakis, Manager of Traffic for HRM. “The idea of the Information Cafe was to present the elements of the plan to the public, and get some feedback from them.”

Attendees cycled through five tables throughout the evening, with each table covering one one of the topics Koutroulakis mentions above, and how they relate to the new action plan.

“The intent of the exercise is to get from the public what, in their opinion, they think is working well, what’s missing, and what should we prioritize, based on the plan that we’ve presented,” says Koutroulakis.

“One of the things I wanted to see was more curb extensions, shortening the distance a pedestrian has to cross, and that’s not in their current design standards,” says Bill Campbell, an attendee, and avid walking enthusiast concerned with walking conditions in the city. “But they do seem open to the idea, which is good.”

“Probably one of the biggest things is I didn’t realize how implicated police officers are with crosswalks and intersections, and on education and safety,” says Isabelle Ouellette, a fourth-year Health Promotions student at Dalhousie, who’s investigating intersection wait times as part of her honours project. “Like, you know that they were there, but I didn’t know they were that into the education part of it.”

The fifth table was a general Share the Road information table. Habib sat at that table, and was interested to hear ideas on how to expand the movement into a more sustainable, volunteer-based campaign across Nova Scotia.

“Whenever we have, say, a pedestrian collision, we all get up and there are many talks on the radio, and then we forget after a few months,” says Habib. “Instead of doing this kind of short-term, event-by-event kind of discussion of these kinds of things, can we have a sustained movement towards safer crosswalks, towards safer biking, towards safer use of not texting, and really have a more sustainable transportation use movement.”

Habib recognizes that the kind of people who came out to the information cafe are already invested in improving the city’s road space, and making it safer. But he feels the movement can’t reach its full potential until they can capture the interest of the everyday pedestrian, and get them to share their input and become more aware of the issues as well.

“Who we don’t get is the one who might need this education or awareness, or improvements. We are not capturing their feedback,” says Habib. “They’re the real users, so they’ll have probably even better ideas, maybe a cost-effective idea. Maybe a simple change could really improve in a bigger way.”

Share the Road has a social media presence, spanning Facebook, YouTube, and they even have a dedicated Twitter hashtag, #ShareTheRoadNS. Habib says that by sharing your stories and your concerns about crosswalk safety via these avenues, they will absolutely find their way to policy-makers, and could have a legitimate impact on your city’s streets.

“When we, as researchers, are getting involved in collecting people’s feedback, at the end of the day, we are also moving it to the policy discussion, say, at the provincial level,” says Habib. “People should really get into it, so that we can also have some sort of understanding.”

“They’re not asking for your input, and then not using it. They are using it, so it is valid,” says Ouellette. “So definitely, go online and say what’s happening in your community. You never know what change it could actually make.”

For more information, visit www.dal.ca/sites/share-the-road.html.