Pellerin: A coroner’s quest to get trucks out of the heart of Manotick

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When you go for a stroll in Manotick on a sunny Saturday morning to grab a latte and some of those wicked scones from 692 Coffee, you don’t necessarily think about death. Dr. James Sproule does.

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The retired deputy chief coroner of Ontario is used to death. And like everyone else, he doesn’t like it. Especially deaths that are predictable, preventable and — infuriatingly — not prevented. Like traffic deaths on a small, quaint road in a small, quaint part of our city.

If only we in Ottawa were as progressive as my favourite Alabama town.

My regular reader knows how much I love spending time in the city of Huntsville, in an otherwise not-so-awesome U.S. state. This wonderfully upbeat and welcoming town of less than 250,000 people is growing so fast that the municipal government is thinking ahead to make sure preventable road deaths are, well, prevented.

This past April it reintroduced its 2022 commitment to implement “Vision Zero” to bring down to zilch the number of people killed or seriously injured on its roads by 2055. This is done using a variety of measures including better road designs and smarter safety features. Vision Zero is simple but if it is not actively endorsed and promoted by political leaders, it’s nothing more than good intentions. Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle is fully behind his town’s road safety ambitions. It will make a difference.

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Huntsville is the only city in Alabama to commit to Vision Zero. Nineteen cities in Canada have done the same, including Ottawa.

I know. I can’t feel it either. In fact, I feel safer using the roads in Huntsville than in Ottawa. And other than that one memorable time when a cop stopped me to ask why I wasn’t walking on the sidewalk that didn’t in fact exist, roads are friendlier in this southern city than in Ottawa.

It was a very close encounter last summer with a flatbed truck on the bridge near Main Street in Manotick that got Dr. Sproule riled up. “In medicine,” he told me in an interview, “we try to investigate ‘near misses’ to prevent the things from actually happening.” When it comes to road crashes, “near misses” don’t get investigated.

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In the document he presented to the Manotick Village & Community Association, and which he shared with me, Sproule doesn’t mince words. It is clear to him, that “the current Main Street-Bridge Street intersection is effectively designed to optimize the likelihood of pedestrian deaths. Heavy truck design itself and the passage of these large commercial vehicles turning through the intersection at Main Street and Bridge Street optimize the likelihood of a fatal pedestrian crash.”

At the very minimum, we should start by making right turns on red illegal. Turning vehicles are implicated in a large proportion of deadly collisions. Making it more difficult for everyone to be in the intersection at the same time will reduce the number of crashes and — consequently — prevent deaths.

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Another big piece of the safety puzzle is to remove trucks from where human beings congregate. In March, I wrote in the Citizen about the infamous truck corridor we have in downtown Ottawa between Highway 5 on the Quebec side and the Queensway via King Edward Avenue, Rideau and Nicholas streets, and that’s a hard one to fix given the number of trucks that need to move from one provincial highway to the other. But in Manotick? Why should there be trucks right in the centre of where everything is?

James Sproule is on a mission to have Manotick emulate Paris, Ont. (a.k.a. “no, the other Paris”) and make trucks use a ring road around, not through, the village. This, he says, “would mitigate the risk of pedestrian fatalities.” It would also improve the smells and sounds of the place.

And it would allow one retired coroner finally to stop having to think about death.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.