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When someone is killed in traffic in Ottawa, city officials already look at what happened and what might be done to keep it from happening again. They just don’t tell very many people what they find out.
“We don’t do that communication,” admitted Phil Landry, the city’s manager of traffic services, as city council’s transportation committee talked about what to do about roadside memorials to dead motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. They don’t release results of their safety studies publicly (other than in a broad annual summary), or even to the families of the people killed. There’s no way to hold the city accountable for its diagnoses of its own failures.
City staff do make internal reports and when they notice patterns they act on them, Landry said: a program to put stickers on the backs of trucks to urge cyclists to stay out of truckers’ blind spots came about that way.
Memorials – crosses, white “ghost bikes,” flowers – are sometimes political statements about how little we value life when we allow roads to be built dangerously or take to the streets recklessly. Often, in fact. If they weren’t meant as physical indictments of lethal decisions, it wouldn’t matter where they were.
Coun. David Chernushenko, a commuting cyclist himself, has said a couple of times that the city can “live with the politicization of ghost bikes.” The question is for how long.
The committee voted Wednesday to take them down after six months. That’s longer than the 90-day time limit city staff had previously proposed, but short enough that they won’t bug people, or shame the city, for too long.
But at least Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney did start the tortured process of revealing publicly what the city finds when it examines deaths on Ottawa’s streets, using the most delicate of a councillor’s tools: a formal inquiry about the impediments to releasing the information publicly.
Sometimes there are privacy concerns. Sometimes a person gets killed in traffic because he or she did something stupid and his or her family would rather the city not announce it. Sometimes a police investigation complicates things.
Responses to inquiries like McKenney’s typically take months, sometimes years, and do not directly result in action. Transportation committee chair Keith Egli said he expects this one to move along quickly and for a policy to follow. That’s good – giving up memorials after six months will be easier if there are lasting changes to intersections and traffic patterns to make the places people have died less dangerous for other people.
Mind you, it’s hard to say when the six-month countdown begins. It’s supposed to be when the city becomes aware of a ghost bike or a cross or a flower display, but there’s no way for the people who put a memorial up to know for sure when that’s happened.
“We’re not saying staff will go on a rampage to identify these things,” planning official Derrick Moodie told the committee. “We’re not proposing any sort of active patrols from a city perspective.” But if the city gets a complaint, the clock starts. Or maybe a city worker notices a memorial in the middle of his or her regular business and makes a note. Or if the local councillor brings it up. Or never.
Then there’s the program that will erect a second memorial after the first one comes down, a city-printed metal sign urging drivers to drive safely in memory of someone killed in traffic. To get such a sign, the victim’s next of kin have to pay $250 and swear that the dead person had never been convicted of a crime and had no bylaw or provincial-offence convictions, either.
Meh, said public-works manager Kevin Wylie. The city will decide when a person’s record makes them unworthy of a memorial and when it doesn’t.
But the wording in the forms is unambiguous. If you can’t make a sworn attestation of your loved one’s innocence in all things, before a provincial commissioner of oaths, don’t bother applying. “I’ll have to take another look at that,” Wylie said outside the meeting.
Both the city officials and councillors went on for a good long time about the exquisite delicacy of what they were trying to do on Wednesday. It is, in fact, impossible. Trying is what’s made this all so messy.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“We don’t do that communication,” admitted Phil Landry, the city’s manager of traffic services, as city council’s transportation committee talked about what to do about roadside memorials to dead motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. They don’t release results of their safety studies publicly (other than in a broad annual summary), or even to the families of the people killed. There’s no way to hold the city accountable for its diagnoses of its own failures.
City staff do make internal reports and when they notice patterns they act on them, Landry said: a program to put stickers on the backs of trucks to urge cyclists to stay out of truckers’ blind spots came about that way.
Memorials – crosses, white “ghost bikes,” flowers – are sometimes political statements about how little we value life when we allow roads to be built dangerously or take to the streets recklessly. Often, in fact. If they weren’t meant as physical indictments of lethal decisions, it wouldn’t matter where they were.
Coun. David Chernushenko, a commuting cyclist himself, has said a couple of times that the city can “live with the politicization of ghost bikes.” The question is for how long.
The committee voted Wednesday to take them down after six months. That’s longer than the 90-day time limit city staff had previously proposed, but short enough that they won’t bug people, or shame the city, for too long.
But at least Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney did start the tortured process of revealing publicly what the city finds when it examines deaths on Ottawa’s streets, using the most delicate of a councillor’s tools: a formal inquiry about the impediments to releasing the information publicly.
Sometimes there are privacy concerns. Sometimes a person gets killed in traffic because he or she did something stupid and his or her family would rather the city not announce it. Sometimes a police investigation complicates things.
Responses to inquiries like McKenney’s typically take months, sometimes years, and do not directly result in action. Transportation committee chair Keith Egli said he expects this one to move along quickly and for a policy to follow. That’s good – giving up memorials after six months will be easier if there are lasting changes to intersections and traffic patterns to make the places people have died less dangerous for other people.
Mind you, it’s hard to say when the six-month countdown begins. It’s supposed to be when the city becomes aware of a ghost bike or a cross or a flower display, but there’s no way for the people who put a memorial up to know for sure when that’s happened.
“We’re not saying staff will go on a rampage to identify these things,” planning official Derrick Moodie told the committee. “We’re not proposing any sort of active patrols from a city perspective.” But if the city gets a complaint, the clock starts. Or maybe a city worker notices a memorial in the middle of his or her regular business and makes a note. Or if the local councillor brings it up. Or never.
Then there’s the program that will erect a second memorial after the first one comes down, a city-printed metal sign urging drivers to drive safely in memory of someone killed in traffic. To get such a sign, the victim’s next of kin have to pay $250 and swear that the dead person had never been convicted of a crime and had no bylaw or provincial-offence convictions, either.
Meh, said public-works manager Kevin Wylie. The city will decide when a person’s record makes them unworthy of a memorial and when it doesn’t.
But the wording in the forms is unambiguous. If you can’t make a sworn attestation of your loved one’s innocence in all things, before a provincial commissioner of oaths, don’t bother applying. “I’ll have to take another look at that,” Wylie said outside the meeting.
Both the city officials and councillors went on for a good long time about the exquisite delicacy of what they were trying to do on Wednesday. It is, in fact, impossible. Trying is what’s made this all so messy.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
