Acknowledging that traffic engineering has prioritized automobiles for decades, progressive cities like Vancouver are creating plans that place people walking and cycling at the top of the transportation hierarchy of modes. While Vancouver has made significant improvements in its cycling infrastructure, the considerations and infrastructure for people walking are the same as they have been for decades. To demonstrate, simply go to any intersection in your city and observe the relationship between crossing timings and street widths. We suspect that in the vast majority of cases, like Vancouver, your city’s intersection is designed to move vehicles through quickly at the expense of the safety or comfort of people walking. This is despite the knowledge that 75% of collisions with people walking occur at intersections.

Slow Streets’ latest report Intersection Repair: Pender St. & Abbott St. provides empirical evidence of this situation and how it undermines the safety of everyone regardless of how they get around. In December 2014, using publically available crash data, Slow Streets mapped the collision data, finding that higher volumes of collisions were correlated with wider streets. To the Strong Towns network, this should come as no surprise - combining highway geometries with dense urban environments is certainly a recipe for disaster. However, this data only tells us that a street or intersection is dangerous – it doesn’t explain what specifically makes it dangerous for people walking and cycling. To truly determine what's happening at one of Vancouver’s top collision spots, Slow Streets conducted sidewalk observations in August 2015 at the intersection of Pender St. and Abbott St.

The Data

Slow Streets used video footage to capture the activities and directional volumes of all modes entering and leaving the intersection. In total, we observed over 3,500 people walking and cycling and counted 1,454 vehicles. The counts were conducted during weekday middays, weekday peak hours and weekend midday to obtain a snapshot of the intersection’s activity at various times.

On average there are over 4,800 people per hour moving through this intersection. Of that, 75% of people entering the intersection were walking, cycling or using transit. On average there are 187 people cycling per hour, however, Slow Streets observed as many as 286 people cycling per hour through the intersection. These levels of cycling are comparable to the volumes observed by Slow Streets on nearby Union Street, one of Vancouver’s busiest cycling neighbourhood boulevards.