The ITE Canada/CARSP 2023 Joint Conference is a gathering of road safety and transportation professionals and students. It provides an opportunity for networking and knowledge exchange. The conference will take place from June 4 to June 7, 2023, at the RBC Convention Centre in Winnipeg, MB. This event is exclusive to in-person attendance and is organized jointly by CARSP (Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals) and ITE Canada (Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers). Integrated Mobility Consultant Emily Thomason and Road Safety Engineer Suzanne Woo will present on The Power of Post-Crash Analysis.
Nearly 2,000 Canadians a year are killed in road crashes and nearly 8,000 more are seriously injured. Typically, road safety engineering efforts have considered fatalities as rare and random events that don’t provide robust evidence for collision reduction efforts. This session will discuss the Dutch and Canadian responses to roadway crash fatalities.
Emily Thomason, from Mobycon, will speak to the Dutch method of crash investigation and look at the ways this practice has re-shaped roadways to prevent further dangerous conditions. She will also speak to this practice’s place with the Dutch Safe Systems approach which emphasizes predictable road conditions, slow speeds and modal separation.
After a fatal crash, municipalities must choose how to respond to the incident – they can conduct a minimal investigation and move on or convene a multidisciplinary taskforce to fully examine all contributing factors and areas for future safety improvements. This presentation will outline the benefits of a thorough, multidisciplinary investigation to better understand trends in and possible solutions to fatal and serious-injury crashes.
Suzanne Woo will speak to her experiences as a road safety engineer. She will outline the typical post crash analysis done by Canadian municipalities, as well as her experience of serving on the City of Ottawa’s fatal collision review committee, which involved public health, police and engineering specialists taking a detailed look at fatal collisions, to determine if there was anything to be collectively learned. This disciplinary cross-pollination led to insights that would likely never have emerged from analysis of collision report data alone. One of those trends is the potential correlation between an individual’s poor driving record, and their likelihood of being involved in a fatal collision.
