Réseau de transport de la Capitale

Bus passenger island will put people at risk, safety expert says

Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com

A traffic safety expert and former city councillor is sounding the alarm about a bus stop island now under construction on Chemin Ste-Foy at the intersection with Ave. Brown.

Paul Mackey has been picketing the site almost daily since April 28, when city workers began building a “boarding bay” or quai d’embarquement pour les arrêts d’autobus, as it’s known in French.

According to a city presentation on the project, the objectives of the “boarding bays” are to ensure the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, maintain universal accessibility to bus stops, limit conflicts between cyclists and buses by avoiding encroachment into the bike lane, and limit conflicts between buses and vehicular traffic when merging and disengaging while stopped.

Mackey told the QCT in an on- site interview that the structures violate safety norms and put at risk students, senior citizens and people with visual impairments wanting to cross the street.

“The project itself has some good objectives,” Mackey said. “It’s to not have cyclists have to wait behind stopped buses. The project is to transfer the bus stop onto an island between the bike lane and the traffic lane. But that raises a number of issues.”

Among those issues, he said, is that “cyclists approaching the intersection will not see the pedestrians, because the stopped articulated bus will block sight lines.” He said cyclists often do not follow traffic signals and may run the red light, putting elementary school students crossing from École Anne-Hébert, for example, at risk.

Mackey said visually impaired people wanting to cross at the intersection will also be at risk. At an information session on the project held on April 22, he asked city officials whether “a blind person on the bus going west and heading to École Anne-Hébert would have to cross the bike path when getting off the bus and recross the bike path at the intersection. The answer was yes. The blind person will be put at risk twice within a short time. There are no tactile warning strips to be installed at the intersection itself.”

He said the association for the blind in Victoria, B.C. sued over a similar boarding island design and won, resulting in a moratorium.

Mackey said he has also raised concerns about the width of the boarding islands, which is 1.6 metres under the city’s plans. He said the standard, according to many sources and guides, is 2.4 metres. The lesser width, he said, poses a hazard for the boarding of passengers in wheelchairs.

With construction well advanced on the installation, Mackey said the city shows no indication of recognizing his warnings and suggestions. “I think the consequences are so serious that there’s not really any choice” for the city to make changes.

“The city council says, ‘well, it’s a pilot project, we’ll adjust as we go along,’ and I said that’s not really an appropriate response, because you’ll make changes if there have been incidents – and we don’t want incidents.”

Once the island on the north side of the intersection is complete, an island is to be installed on the south side. Eventually, the city plans to install islands at several other intersections along the Chemin Ste-Foy bike path.

The city said in its presentation that it chose the Ave. Brown intersection for the pilot project because of the “ease of implementation [and the] opportunity to secure an area with high traffic of vulnerable users (school zone). The project was developed by city teams, in collaboration with the Réseau de Transport de la Capitale (RTC) and the consultation table on universal accessibility.”

A series of consultations and assessments is planned to evaluate the impact of the pilot project.

Mackey said, “There’s tons of problems with this project, and if it stays in effect, it’s going to be a safety problem for years on end.”

The QCT requested a response to Mackey’s concerns from city officials and did not receive a response by press time.