39 Collisions a Day: Fed Up Residents Fight for Safer Streets
Scene of a collision on Henderson Highway.
It was a perfect blue-sky day, and before 8 a.m., at least two people’s days were already ruined.
An hour earlier, I’d been walking with my son toward the bus stop on Henderson Highway — a stroad that bisects our Winnipeg neighborhood of Elmwood — when we saw a flash of black whiz by and then heard a terrible, loud bang. A few steps farther down the road, we realized we’d narrowly missed witnessing a collision. Two vehicles were stopped, their four-way flashers on, while drivers paced nearby on their phones.
In the low dawn light, I couldn’t see enough to tell what sort of collision might have taken place. I didn’t want to rubberneck or gawk, and there was nothing we could do anyway — we hadn’t actually witnessed the collision. So, when our bus pulled up, I accompanied my son to his before-school badminton practice. When I got back, a tow truck and first responders were on the scene, and police tape was draped over both vehicles.
The sun was now up, and it was otherwise a beautiful spring morning. But for these two drivers, the day had taken an awful, unexpected turn. As far as I could tell, there hadn’t been any serious injuries, but the vehicles would need to be towed. Now there was no choice but to deal with the consequences.
I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 15 years, and despite hearing about collisions regularly, this was the first one I’d come close to witnessing firsthand. So it was odd when, only two days later, my husband told me that he’d been standing outside with the kids after school and heard another loud crash coming from Henderson.
I found a social media post from the city’s Transportation Management Centre pinpointing the collision (because, you see, it was affecting afternoon rush-hour traffic). Turns out, that collision had taken place mere steps away from the last one.
Two collisions in the span of two days in virtually the same spot. When I added that to the recent collisions I’d read about online, I found that along a three-block stretch of Henderson, there had been at least five collisions in five weeks. One involved a pedestrian and his dog being hit by a right-turning driver in a crosswalk. Another involved a vehicle driving over the sidewalk and through a chain-link fence. In the last one, witnesses reported someone lying on the ground and an ambulance on the scene.
And those were just the ones that I knew about.
I wasn’t surprised at this. As someone who frequently walks and bikes in the area, I am well acquainted with its traffic-related dangers to those outside of vehicles. But as I was thinking about these recent collisions, my thoughts also turned to what Henderson feels like for drivers. When traffic is light, it feels fine inside a vehicle. But during the morning and afternoon rush, Henderson is awful for everyone.
Like other stroads, Henderson has a high speed limit (60 kph or 37 mph) and, with tens of thousands of drivers accessing this area every day, many potential conflict points as drivers pursue different goals:
Driving straight through.
Turning onto and off of side streets.
Turning into and out of parking lots, or looking for street parking.
Looking for addresses.
Looking for a safe window to turn across several lanes of oncoming traffic.
Turning right on red.
Reading time-specific turn and transit signage.
Keeping an eye out for pedestrians and cyclists.
The point is, Henderson is a high-capacity, high-speed roadway that is also a highly complex environment. Some people are trying to drive down it as quickly as possible, while others are trying to enter, leave or simply move from one side to the other. The amount of collisions comes as no surprise to me. It’s almost a miracle that there aren’t even more!
What’s so disconcerting to me is that this is just how it is. Frequent collisions are written off as an inevitability, a necessary by-product of transportation, or the result of bad drivers who never get caught and who should know better.
As of this writing (mid-April 2024), the most recent collision statistics available for Winnipeg are from 2021, in which over 14,000 were reported. Those are just the collisions captured in the official statistics, which don’t necessarily include minor incidents that were settled outside of insurance or weren't reported. Most of these collisions never make the news. We only find out about them if we happen to witness them, hear about them from a neighbor or friend, or see a post about them on social media.
Extremes like “deadliest year for pedestrians” or “record number of cyclist deaths” tend to get attention in the media, but then … nothing happens. And, similarly, the steady drip, drip, drip of everyday collisions — which, here in Winnipeg, averaged a staggering 39 reported collisions per day in 2021 — doesn’t register as a serious situation that needs to be addressed.
A couple of months ago, Chuck Marohn had some great quotes in Asia Mieleszko’s piece, “Is Tracking Traffic Deaths a Priority in Your City?”, that I haven’t stopped thinking about:
“When this data is not available in real time, it dulls the urgency.
Instead, there’s a death statistic published 18 months later, completely divorced from the place of where it happened. Instead, the city maps a trend for the year or the last five years, but what about what actually happened? In the specific place where it happened?
If the city cared about traffic deaths, we would witness them taking an urgent response to crashes. We would see city hall tracking traffic deaths in real time, because a new fatal crash would mobilize people … You track what you care about.”
While Chuck’s comments are specifically about fatal accidents, I think the lag between collisions and statistical reports is just as big of a problem when it comes to run-of-the-mill, non-fatal collisions. (And trust me, I cringed as I used the phrase “run-of-the-mill” in the same breath as “collisions.” As an advocate, the risk of serious injury to my loved ones is one of my central motivations.)
Even when there are no serious injuries, collisions cost people in many other ways: time, money and inconvenience for the drivers involved; public resources in the form of first responder time and infrastructure repair; inconvenience for others as they navigate around the collision or repair private property; the ecological impacts of debris, litter, oil and fluid leaks; etc. And yet, all of this has become normalized as a fact of life.
What if we monitored collision numbers and their associated costs the same way that we track other information? What if the number of daily collisions was reported on the local news along with the weather, gas prices and crime statistics? If 39 collisions a day aren’t enough to make us sit up and take notice, how many would? What would it take for us to say, “Enough is enough”?
For several years, community groups in my neighborhood have been asking the city to do something to make Henderson safer. And this is only the latest go-round of begging for change. Residents have been calling attention to this dangerous stretch for more than 40 years.
We’ve suggested lowering the speed limit; we’ve suggested adding on-street patios, curb extensions, on-street parking and continuous sidewalks on the side streets; we’ve suggested planting more trees — basically anything that might get people to slow down and pay more attention. But to date, we’ve not been allowed to make any physical changes to the street design. Anything that might affect traffic flow has been deemed completely out of the question. We’ll keep pressing. Keep gathering evidence.
When I started writing this column, I was angry. I still am. This anger doesn’t feel good; I mostly love my neighborhood, and it’s frustrating that this one major part of it is so dysfunctional, working against people and businesses. Holding us back from being a happier, healthier and more prosperous place.
I want to end this on a hopeful note, though.
Is it a problem that collision statistics are so far removed from the moment when they might compel us to action? Yes. But we don’t need to let that hold us back. We can see with our own eyes that there’s a big problem. We just need to keep doing what we can.
To date, we haven’t been able to convince the city to make — or allow the community to test — design changes to make Henderson safer for everyone. But what we have managed to do is install eight of these beautiful marbles on the median. These marbles are lovingly painted by community groups and bring smiles to those who see them. This spring, arches over Henderson will be installed, too.
Hand-painted marbles increase visual complexity and encourage drivers to slow down.
Sketch of planned arches.
Both the marbles and the forthcoming arches are designed to create edge friction: visual complexity to encourage drivers to slow down.
This might seem like small peanuts compared to the big design changes that are needed on Henderson. In a way, they are. And that’s OK. They’re the result of humbly observing where people struggle and doing the next smallest thing to address it. We’re up against a big system, but we’ll keep doing what we can.
Emma Durand-Wood likes walkable cities, front porches, street trees, bumping into neighbors, riding her bike, downtowns, and any excuse to check out a new coffee shop, bakery, or shop. A Winnipegger by choice, she lives in Elmwood with her husband and three children. You can connect with her on Twitter @emmaewood.