Raise the Hammer

Despite your rudeness, I will assume that you are genuinely interested in trying to understand why the rate of pedestrian accident death and injury in some cities is a tiny fraction of Hamilton's. The point is that humans are basically the same everywhere, but the accident rate isn't.

So far, the only suggestion you have made is that drivers receive more training in "Europe" (I suppose you mean France, since that is what we are talking about).

However France has traditionally had a relatively high overall accident rate, mostly associated with highways and freeways (e.g. 4443 killed in 2008 for a population of 64 million compared with 2187 for Canada with a population of 33 million), so I doubt that is the explanation. I'm walking my children to school every day here, and can attest to the difference in driver - pedestrian interaction in the urban environment first hand.

Simply going through the list of deaths and guessing what was or was not a factor is not helpful. Even police have difficulty establishing the exact cause of accidents! What we do know is that year after year the rate of deaths and accidents is far lower in Paris than in Hamilton; it is this statistic we are trying to understand.

Do you really believe that the extremely high pedestrian density is not a factor? Did you actually look at the Hamilton study that showed relative risk decreases with pedestrian flow, even within Hamilton?

Do you really believe that giving pedestrians safe and attractive infrastructure does not encourage more people to walk (which in turn lowers the injury rate)?

Note that in the past years many pedestrian deaths and injuries have been associated with pedestrians crossing multi-lane arteries away from a crosswalk because the crosswalks are to far apart (400m or more).

What suggestions would you make (besides admonishing people to be "more careful") to reduce pedestrian accident rates? Why shouldn't we have the low rates of somewhere like Paris?

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2011-10-26 03:55:41