Suzanne Woo: For Safer Streets, Focus on What You Can Control
The intersection at King Edward Avenue in Ottawa, where two women were struck by a vehicle, leaving one injured and the other pronounced dead.
On October 18, 2022, at around 5:30 a.m., two women were crossing King Edward Avenue on the periphery of the University of Ottawa’s campus. Midway through the crosswalk, they were struck by a vehicle, landing them both in the hospital. Later that same day, one of the women was pronounced dead.
The collision was hardly the first to occur on that exact intersection, prompting street safety advocates to question how the road’s design is a regular contributor to tragedy. In recent years, road design has, in fact, become central to how Ottawa understands and examines crashes. That’s why when the city launched ads admonishing jaywalkers as part of its Road Safety Action Plan, locals were confused.
“It blames the victims of road violence for their injuries or death, when, in fact, the city bears the greatest responsibility as residents do not design the potentially dangerous streets they are forced to navigate, walk along and cross,” a councilor who ultimately requested the city remove the ads, told the Ottawa Citizen.
The city obliged and within days, the ads were taken down. This was a relief for many, especially for Suzanne Woo, a road safety professional and longtime advocate for people who walk and bike. Ultimately, the approval of the campaign prompted questions deeper than what the ads themselves depicted. For Woo, these were questions about agency, who has the power to transform our streets, and where cities should be directing their focus.
Focusing on What You Can Control
Woo was Ottawa’s senior engineer of road safety engineering for over seven years and currently co-chairs the Transportation Association of Canada’s Vision Zero and Safe System Approach Subcommittee. She was also a part of the Fatal Collision Review Committee (one of the first in Canada), wherein she coordinated with different departments to holistically examine crashes, taking into account all of the potential contributing factors like driving history, visibility, land use, and road design.
“[Before this committee] we operated in silos, not even working with the same information,” she shared. “Within my role, I wouldn’t have access to someone’s driving history and, similarly, there were people who had no idea a position like mine even existed!”
All of this to say that she can verify firsthand that the city is trying. It’s made strides. Yet, the same city that adopted the Fatal Collision Review Committee, and the same professionals who advanced the Road Safety Action Plan in which Woo identifies several auspicious initiatives in store for Ottawa’s roads, are responsible for an ad targeting “jaywalkers.”
“In city governments and transportation departments, we often feel powerless,” Woo relayed. “That’s what the ads communicated.”
Strong Towns has long cataloged that sentiment amongst planners, engineers, and even cities. City staff, fielding complaints and injuries along a street feel powerless to redesign it as it is technically maintained by the state; engineers feel restricted by the codes and liabilities that govern how and what changes they can implement, disappointing the public which relies on their discretion—not to mention the usual hurdles of budgets and tradeoffs for how the space is allocated in constrained road allowances.
“[W]e need to recognize that we do have agency. We can’t control everything, but we can focus on what we can control.”
“But we need to recognize that we do have agency,” Woo stated. “We can’t control everything, but we can focus on what we can control.” The contentious ads focused on behavior and culture—something as hard to control as it is to measure—whereas Ottawa should instead focus on street design. And street design, for Woo, begins with deciding which road user is a priority: the one in the car or the one on foot.
When a Street Is Designed To Fail
Woo served as an expert at Strong Towns’ latest Crash Analysis Studio, which examined a crash on the University of Ottawa’s campus that injured one pedestrian and killed another on October 18, 2022. The crash occurred at the intersection of King Edward Avenue and Somerset Street East, which is surrounded by eateries and university amenities, connecting those on foot or two wheels to a waterfront path and the Corktown Footbridge, closed entirely to cars.
King Edward Ave may not be a textbook “stroad,” but Woo points out how it attempts to provide an optimal experience for both motorists and pedestrians. The October fatality and the frequency of “close calls” locals associate with the area, however, demonstrate that the experience for people walking is far from optimal.
“This is a design that is not in alignment with the area,” Strong Towns President and retired engineer Charles Marohn observed during the Crash Analysis Studio. “...Students living out what you'd hope would be some of the best years of their lives … and yet you have this very dangerous situation, in some ways indifferent to their experience and their needs.”
The speed limit on King Edward Ave is posted at 40 kilometers per hour (approximately 25 mph) but Woo explains that the road not only welcomes traffic from the nearby highway, most drivers on King Edward use it as a means of leaving the city. “It’s the most direct way to get to Quebec and so while not all, most vehicular traffic isn’t remaining within the area; it’s leaving Ottawa.”
King Edward Ave is often congested, Woo pointed out, which results in slower speeds and accordingly, less of an impression that the street is dangerous. At the same time, when it isn’t congested, like in the early hours of the morning when the crash occurred, high speeds are the norm. One study found that 59% of motorists in a period of one and a half hours were operating above the posted speed limit.
Marohn wasn’t surprised to learn that speeding was not uncommon. He observed that just a block from the intersection, the road’s width and the absence of optical narrowing along it fails to prepare drivers for the high volume of foot and bicycle traffic they’ll encounter soon. “It looks like a raceway,” he said. Other features like inadequate street lights—and importantly, the shadows they cast—as well as sightlines obstructed by signs only multiply the probability of tragedy.
These contributing factors, notably, fall under the agency of the city. Yet, a year after the crash occurred, not much looks different than it did the morning of October 18, 2022.
In her wildest dreams, Woo would love to see cars outfitted with devices that disable the prospect of speeding—such as the speed limiters or ISA (Intelligent Speed Assist) that have been mandated throughout the EU. Otherwise, she feels raised crosswalks that compel motorists to slow down ahead of and at intersections, would be an appropriate long-term intervention for the intersection, and along the corridor adjacent to the university.
In addition to long-term visions, Marohn offered alternatives that could be pursued “literally in the next hour” to address the urgency of the intersection the panel agreed was fundamentally unsafe. Like Woo, he’s witnessed that individuals in city government are hesitant to exercise the agency they possess. Rather than wait to determine the feasibility of or acquire the funding to install more involved traffic-calming initiatives, he recommended that city officials should at least begin by narrowing King Edward with whatever tools they have at their disposal.
“I think you could do it this afternoon with 10 construction barrels and make a transformative difference,” he suggested. “By next week, I would install lights… And light up where people are standing in that intersection so that they wouldn’t be hidden.”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.