Calls for implementation of Vision Zero Action Plan grow after collision kills two

The death of two pedestrians in a Walkerville car crash has prompted calls for the City of Windsor to implement a safety plan it approved in January.

 The Windsor Police Service confirmed Wednesday that a crash along Walker Road on Monday took the lives of a 68-year-old woman and a 63-year-old man.

 Lori Newton, the executive director of Bike Windsor-Essex, said the tragedy must prompt change at the municipal level.

Pointing to the Vision Zero Action Plan, Newton said the city must give the plan “teeth” and “meaningful targets,” before it becomes another policy sitting on the shelf.

Approved in January, the Vision Zero Action Plan lays out 42 initiatives to achieve zero fatal and major injury collisions on Windsor roads.

Newton, who also runs The Bike Kitchen on Walker Road, said her business was contacted by police for security camera footage of the incident.

Newton lives on the other side of the road and said the “dangerous stretch” makes it difficult to cross the street.

“The road has just been engineered as though it's 1985. The road is too wide, and it's not marked, and you can see the traffic flies,” Newton said.

She wants better measures to eliminate “drag racing” on the arterial road, amongst other challenges.

“It needed to be done before now, but you know, this tragedy I hope will have the city stop and think,” Newton said.

According to Windsor police, officers arrived on the scene shortly after 2 p.m., finding a red SUV with heavy damage turned on its side.

Police said the driver was extracted from their vehicle and taken to hospital. They said both of the victims were pedestrians.

A one kilometre stretch of road, from Wyandotte Street East to Ottawa Street, was closed for several hours.

Newton believes the city’s approach has long favoured the needs of drivers over the safety of other road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists.

“Instead of saying, how can I get vehicles through this stretch of Walker Road as quickly as possible, it should be how do I keep pedestrians and cyclists safe on this road,” Newton said.

CTV News has confirmed at least five pedestrians have been involved in motor vehicle collisions since the beginning of September.

Anneke Smit, the director of the Centre for Cities at the University of Windsor, said what’s happening on the roads is due to the “lack of action.”

“The slow implementation and almost non-implementation of that [Vision Zero] report, at some point, I mean, we have to reckon with what the impacts of that are,” Smit said.

The recommendations in the Vision Zero Action Plan consist of three types of implementations — those done by data collection and analysis, those requiring a “complete streets” policy and those that could be implemented in a single step.

Smit said the city must find a balanced approach to improve safety along the roads.

“It's about taking a holistic approach that requires the implementation of a number of different measures to get to a point where the priority is on the safety of those vulnerable road users because we have to understand they are everywhere,” she said.

“The decisions people are making to not get on a bike or to walk because of the danger that they're facing, those have widespread implications across our community, and we need to take that seriously at this moment.”

The action plan states the goal is to eliminate fatal and major injury collisions on streets within 15 years of adoption of the plan. However, for Newton, there’s hope the latest tragedy will spark movement far sooner than expected.

“We've got the policies, let's just, you know, do it, get the work done for people’s lives,” Newton said.