| Harvey Specter | 11-12-2009 04:15 AM |
Accident-prone Metro Vancouver home to all top 10 crash sites
Quote:
Brunette Highway, Willingdon Avenue at the freeway lead with 410 crashes each in ’08
By Larry Pynn, Vancouver SunNovember 11, 2009
All of B.C.’s top-10 motor-vehicle crash sites are located in Metro Vancouver and half of them are stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway, ICBC statistics show.
Two stretches of Highway 1 freeway — the intersection with Brunette Avenue on the New Westminster-Coquitlam border, and with Willingdon Avenue in Burnaby — shared the dubious honour of first place with 410 crashes apiece last year. That’s more than one collision per day at each location.
Knight Street at Southeast Marine Drive, an intersection located at the bottom of a hill and a notorious place for speeders, recorded 335 crashes, while the Knight Street Bridge had 250.
Two more stretches of Highway 1 tied at 240 crashes — the intersections with Gaglardi Way in Burnaby and 152nd Street in Surrey — while Highway 1 at 176th Street in Surrey had 225 crashes.
The Alex Fraser Bridge between Delta and Richmond saw 195 crashes.
Finishing off the top 10 locations, King George Highway at 88th Avenue in Surrey and the Lions Gate Bridge between Vancouver and North Vancouver each had 190 crashes.
(ICBC rounded the crash statistics to the nearest five.)
For comparison, the B.C. Transportation Ministry reports that Highway 1 at the Port Mann Bridge carried an average of 118,600 vehicles per day last year, the Alex Fraser Bridge 98,700 vehicles, and the Lions Gate 61,300 vehicles.
Staff Sgt. Marc Alexander of RCMP traffic services said in response that sheer volume is one explanation for the statistics, but so are excessive speed, inattention, and motorists failing to leave enough distance.
Alexander said fender-benders are common on freeway on-ramps, especially during morning and afternoon rush hours. Inattentive and impatient motorists can follow too closely and not have enough time to stop should a driver ahead of them become indecisive while merging and suddenly stop.
“It leads to your classic rear-ender,” he said, noting a third motorist travelling from behind may then also become involved in the collision.
Alexander said alternating merge lights have proven a “great tool” at spacing traffic entering freeways, including those employed at on-ramps on the Lougheed Highway and at Cape Horn westbound at Highway 1.
He added that motorists should leave earlier to reach their destinations, especially in dark and rainy conditions.
ICBC spokesman Mark Jan Vrem said the top 10 sites are “choke points [bridges], or convergence points [intersections, interchanges],” which combined with high traffic volumes lead to more crashes.
Common contributing factors include following too closely, speeding, failing to yield the right of way, running lights, and changing lanes without shoulder-checking, he said.
Interchanges are often 1950s and 1960s designs, built for lower volumes of traffic.
Jan Vrem said new highway infrastructure under the province’s Gateway Program will address some of these problems, especially on accident-prone Highway 1.
lpynn@vancouversun.com
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