New Westminster used an “emerging technology” as part of its assessment of safety at East Columbia and Brunette Avenue – and hopes it may be used for future traffic assessments.
On July 8, council supported recommendations aimed at improving the safety at East Columbia and Braid Street, a location where a pedestrian was killed in February 2023.
In 2023, the city hired TranSafe Consulting Ltd. to review the intersection and to recommend short-term and longer-term measures to improve the safety of the intersection for all road users.
As part of that study, the city held an online workshop attended by “interest holders” including the New Westminster police, fire and engineering operations departments, Fraser Health Authority and Royal Columbian Hospital, HUB Cycling, the BC Trucking Association, and TransLink.
“The workshop discussion pointed to the need for the safety review to consider not only actual safety outcomes (historical collision data) but also ‘near misses’, as there was a strong perception that the conflicts between road users are far more prevalent than actual collisions and strongly affect perceptions of road safety at the intersection – particularly for vulnerable road users on foot, bike and other personal mobility devices,” said a staff report.
“In response to this sentiment, staff expanded the project scope to include video-based conflict analysis, an emerging technology that assesses the frequency and potential severity of ‘near misses’ (where evasive action may be taken) using multi-day video of the study area.”
According to a staff report, this work “significantly” increased the timeline for completing the study.
At the July 8 meeting, Coun. Ruby Campbell questioned if staff anticipate using the video-based analysis technology to assess the frequency and potential severity of near misses at other locations that have been identified as areas of concern in the city’s intersection safety study.
“This was a really interesting opportunity for us to use this technology and to learn from it, and we do look forward to applying it in other locations where we can benefit from that type of video analysis,” said Lisa Leblanc, the city’s director of engineering. “It was very informative. It definitely helped us to assess what could be done here, to assess where the problem areas were. We look forward to benefitting from that advanced technology in other areas.”
Leblanc said the East Columbia and Brunette intersection has been raised as an issue through the development of the active transportation network plan, but it was not one of the top crash sites in the city’s intersection safety study.
“We conduct the intersection safety study on a five-to-seven-year cycle. Part of that study or a big basis of that study is an analysis of the crash statistics throughout the city. With each iteration of that study, we learn more; we gain additional perspective in terms of how the crash data is assessed,” she said. “This location … is not within the Top 10, but the location was studied.”
The intersection network screening road safety review, received by council in August 2023, included collision data, analysis and road safety recommendations for New Westminster streets.
