In Inverness, Saanich, and Edmonton, officials are using hard cash and hard data to make roads less lethal and more beautiful for pedestrians and cyclists.

Thanks to a combined investment of C$14 million from the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia and the Municipality of the County of Inverness, safer streets are coming to the tiny rural hamlet (population 1200) on Cape Breton Island’s western coast. The funds will be used to build or rebuild 3.7 kilometres of sidewalk through the town centre and add nearly three kilometres of new multi-use paths and trails.

“This significant investment in open spaces is more than just infrastructure; it’s a gateway to social mobility for residents and visitors,” Inverness County Warden Bonny MacIsaac said in a federal news release. “By creating accessible streets and vibrant spaces, we’re not only enhancing connectivity but also supporting economic sustainability, development, and growth.”

In Saanich, British Columbia, city council’s draft 10-year road-safety plan “hits the right notes” but lacks detail—especially on funding, writes the Victoria Times Colonist. Unveiled in mid-February, the plan includes infrastructure changes to protect pedestrians and cyclists at 20 of the city’s highest-risk intersections.

While the plan is a good move, it’s not enough to protect walkers and two-wheelers in the city of 120,000, said Todd Litman, founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

“Pedestrians are at risk in all kinds of situations, particularly where there isn’t a sidewalk,” Litman said. Transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods that are less dependent on car travel tend to have lower traffic fatality rates than “automobile-dependent sprawl,” he added, and the Saanich plan should factor that in.

“Part of a smart traffic safety program is actually just making sure that anybody that wants to live in one of those safe, compact, walkable neighbourhoods is able to do so,” Litman said.

“Are we going to spend money widening highways and building more parking facilities, or is Saanich going to take those infrastructure investments and instead spend them on completing the sidewalk and crosswalk networks, improving bicycle facilities, and improving public transit?”

Others in the community share Litman’s sense that more must be done to protect people on streets and sidewalks. “More than half of those who responded to a road safety survey reported feeling unsafe while cycling in Saanich,” says the Colonist.

Meanwhile, Edmonton has become an exemplar for road safety—a place where, “on most weeks, no one dies in a car crash,” writes NBC 5 Investigates. Hoping to understand how city planners in Dallas, Texas (population 1.3 million) might improve their city’s horrendous road safety record, NBC 5 made a trip to Edmonton (population 1.1 million) last fall. 

“Last year Edmonton had just 14 traffic deaths while Dallas had 228,” notes NBC 5. The high fatality rate has left the Texan city with the unhappy distinction of having “the highest traffic death rate among United States cities with more than one million people.”

Dallas city officials committed to Vision Zero Dallas in 2022, pledging to “eliminate all traffic-related pedestrian deaths and reach a 50% reduction in severe injuries from crashes by 2030.” But progress has been slow. As of early November last year, most of the planned action items for 2023 were either still in progress or had yet to be started.

An update on Vision Zero Dallas last week revealed one urgent action item still not completed: the repainting of a faded crosswalk that constitutes the only protection for students whose high school opens onto a six-lane road.

“I know you all are putting in work, but if I was a member of the public watching, I’d say, ‘What, we have to await yet more concrete details and concrete steps?’” said Dallas city councillor Jaime Resendez.

As for what Dallas might learn from the “Canadian town” of Edmonton—or “the Texas of the North”—the American reporting team was impressed by “scramble crosswalks,” which involve programming traffic lights to briefly halt traffic in all directions to “allow pedestrians to cross the street either from corner to corner or diagonally through the center of the street.”

“Right-hand turns are also temporarily prohibited, preventing drivers from turning into people in crosswalks,” NBC explains.

Bike lanes, narrowed roads, curb extensions, brightly painted crosswalks, and neon-yellow automated speed enforcement trucks are other key parts of Edmonton’s Vision Zero plan, adopted in 2015. And it appears to be working, according to the latest city data from 2021, when traffic deaths had dropped by 50% and severe injuries by 30%. Pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries dropped by 27%.

“When you ask city leaders how they achieved those reductions, the answer often includes one word—data,” writes NBC, noting that Edmonton’s Vision Zero team “uses data to first identify where people are injured and killed the most and then they attack those spots with everything from high-tech traffic enforcement to radical street redesigns.”

The other things working for Edmonton are hard cash and sufficient staff. The city has a full-time group focused on its safety plan and invests about C$180 million per year redeveloping neighbourhoods with a heavy Vision Zero focus, says NBC.

In Dallas, or “Alberta of the South”, city council has allotted only US$1.7 million so far, “and most staff working on the plan were also assigned to other duties.”