City of Ottawa staff are defending the graphic nature of a new online advertisement aimed at discouraging jaywalking on city streets, saying it is part of a campaign focusing on behaviours will "depict the serious nature of road safety and lead to greater awareness to all road users of their respons...
"We continually flame road violence as an outcome of personal choices yet we all know very well it's the result of our cities choices," Tom Flood said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
"This is an unacceptable ad; victim blaming road violence is not the city I believe in," architect Toon Dreessen said.
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Statistics provided by Gonthier shows 25 per cent of all fatal and major injury collisions on Ottawa's roads involve pedestrians. The memo provided data on collisions between 2017 and 2021 on Ottawa roads:
29 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian was crossing a road midblock (away from an intersection)
23 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian with the right-of-way was struck at an intersection by a left turning driver
11 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian who did not have the right-of-way was struck by a vehicle travelling straight through an intersection
'Jaywalking', like piracy, is a crime invented and enforced among the public by greedy corporations. Roads were originally for pedestrians. This and the fact that cities are designed only for car owners means more profit for car makers. Don't encourage corporate demonization words like jaywalking.
If bears kept killing people in our cities, would we do something about the bears, or would we blame people for being mauled?
We need to design our streets to be safer, which involves incorporating traffic calming measures so that drivers will choose to drive at speeds that are safe for everybody.
29 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian was crossing a road midblock (away from an intersection)
So 71% don't involve jaywalking at all? Funny how they left that out.
@Rodeo@BedSharkPal Crossing away from an intersection is only illegal (or in anti-pedestrian slang, “jaywalking”) if it’s between two adjacent signalized intersections. Crossing against a “don’t walk” signal could also be considered “jaywalking”… but police reports are notoriously inaccurate and windshield biased anyway so take everything with a grain of salt. Most dangerous crossings happen due to bad traffic engineering, regardless of legality.
That may be somewhat biased if most people don't jaywalk and instead concentrate at intersections. California just made jaywalking legal, so we'll find out in a few years I suppose.
The writing of the copy of the final example is so fucking bad, and the graphics on all of them are noticeably poor. When they say, "evidence-based," I wonder how many adventures were had between the evidence it was based on, and the crap that they finally delivered.