Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Collisions, injuries, and deaths involving OC Transpo

As reported in La Presse, OC Transpo has averaged an injury every other day and one death a year over the first decade of the 2000s. From the story:
Des documents obtenus en vertu de la Loi sur l'accès à l'information démontrent qu'entre 2000 et 2009, les autobus de la société de transport en commun de la Ville d'Ottawa ont été impliqués dans 2057 accidents de la route qui ont fait 9 morts et 1868 blessés.
Or, roughly translated (any mistakes being my own):
Documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show that between 2000 and 2009, the City of Ottawa's bus transit company was involved in 2,057 road accidents that resulted in nine deaths and left 1,868 injured.
As interim Transit Commission Chair Diane Deans said in the article, even one accident is too many, but they seem an inevitability given the number of hours logged driving across our city. The article goes on to say that in certain years, Ottawa had more accidents than even Montreal's transit system, despite a smaller fleet.

I will note, however, that considering how many cars and drivers are taken off the road on a transit system, the number of lives saved as a result of increasing public transit use would have to massively outweigh the number of accidents it costs; the American Public Transportation Association estimates that riding transit is 170 times safer than driving a personal automobile.

1 comment:

George Smith said...
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