The number of fatal traffic collisions in Edmonton may be alarmingly up from last year, but officials say it’s too soon to tell what the causes might be. Edmonton police first raised an alarm over the number of deadly crashes this year in late May, when three people died over two days in separate collisions. Then-interim Police Chief Devin Laforce said at a media conference soon after that speed was a factor in each case. At the time, 13 people had died in Edmonton traffic collisions this year. That number has since risen to 26, the same number of traffic deaths on Edmonton roads in all of 2024, an increase of 31 per cent. Edmonton Police Sgt. Richard Windover says his major collisions unit has “seen a number of things that we believe are contributing” to the rise in deadly crashes this year, highlighting impairment, speed and distraction as rising trends. Impairment, speed loom large Windover told CTV News Edmonton in August about 14 per cent of fatal collisions involved impairment. Last year, the percentage was seven. He also said 52 per cent of traffic fatalities this year involved speed. “Speed is a big thing because it not only contributes to collision occurrence, but also to collision severity,” Windover said. “As speeds go up, the chance for injury and the chance for fatality also increases.” The city’s safe mobility team, the department tasked with following and applying the principles of internationally recognized traffic safety strategy Vision Zero on Edmonton streets, echoes Windover when they say “many factors that contribute to an increase or decrease in collision numbers, including the type of road, traffic conditions, environmental and road conditions, and time of day.” Both Windover and Tazul Islam, the safe mobility team’s acting director, say it’s too soon to pinpoint exact causes in the rise of traffic deaths. Dr. Anthony Singhal, a neuroscientist in the department of psychology at the University of Alberta, said impairment is a main factor in collisions and that it involves more than alcohol or drugs. “We think about impairment associated with stress, associated with fatigue, people who haven’t slept or have a sleep disorder,” Singhal told CTV News Edmonton last month. “You can have passive fatigue, which is essentially boredom. Your vigilance can dip if you’re bored, which can also be a risk factor. We think about aggressive driving as also being key, and speeding is really a main factor, taking unnecessary risks, running red lights.” Distracted driving takes several forms Both Windover and Singhal said distracted driving is playing a rising, major role in fatal collisions. As mobile phones continue to become a fixture in people’s lives, so too do they factor into a driver’s experience. But while police try to keep watch for drivers using mobile phones, it’s difficult to enforce distracted driving laws, he said. “One of the difficulties with the investigations of collisions where distraction is involved is actually showing that and proving that,” he said. “People are hiding the fact of what they’re doing. “There’s a lot of stuff that has to go into trying to obtain, let’s say, cell phone records. We can’t just get them from the phone companies. We can’t just look through people’s phones. There is an extensive process that takes place in those investigations for distraction.” Singhal said while mobile phones are a principal point of distraction for drivers, so are others: commonplace, accepted factors such as “passengers in the car, conversations, children in the back seat and listening to a podcast on the radio – all of those things can be distracting.” “The legislation, of course, is against using a handheld (device), but the research is very clear that it’s a cognitive distraction,” he said. “Certainly, taking your eyes off the road to look at a phone is dangerous in and of itself, but the cognitive distraction, even in a hands-free situation, is also distracting. That is legal to do, and it’s probably been normalized in the sense that more and more people know that’s allowed to be done and are more likely to engage in it than 15 or 20 years ago.” Even something as commonplace as road construction can be a point of distraction, said Singhal, whose own research has looked into how emotion impacts performance, particularly in the context of driving. “We study it from the point of view of emotion regulation, and we know that emotion ... can enhance cognition and performance,” he said. “A positive mood state can certainly improve the way we think and behave, but a negative mood state can also really be damaging to our performance and our cognition.” Intersections ‘high-collision zones’ When it comes to the role the province’s reduction of photo enforcement plays – on April 1 this year, the Alberta government banned photo radar on all provincial highways and connectors, limited photo radar speed enforcement to school, playground and construction zones, and restricted intersection cameras to red-light enforcement only – Windover said it’s “very difficult to capture what the reduction in those speed-on-green and photo radar has done.” Islam, while not addressing photo enforcement restrictions directly, said in a statement “as with any trend in traffic safety data, it will take some time to fully understand the contributing factors around the recent increase in collisions.” He said the safe mobility team uses crash data from police, one of the main datasets it consults, “to make informed decisions.” “Traffic safety data is part of the City’s evidence-based safe systems approach to accomplishing Vision Zero,” Islam said. “The city uses this collision data when prioritizing Safe Mobility projects and initiatives.” And while the city doesn’t have current data, past analyses of photo enforcement at intersections have shown numbers trend downward when cameras are used: Edmonton’s 2023 Automated Traffic Enforcement Report shows crashes at Whitemud Drive and 111 Street dropped from an annual average of 12 to five after one was installed at the crossroads in 2018. Singhal said he couldn’t speak for current photo enforcement statistics in Edmonton, but that intersections in general “are high collision zones within a city. That’s probably universal.” “In Canada, we know that (when) those high traffic, high collision intersections, when they do have some kind of photo monitoring scenarios, they become safer,” he said, referring to past studies in Winnipeg that found collision rates were significantly lower at intersections that had photo radar. Helsinki example shows Vision Zero quest ‘possible’ Overall, the goal of all parties is to contribute to the reduction, if not elimination, of fatal collisions, something that efforts in other parts of the world has proved effective. News that Helsinki, Finland’s principal city whose metro population is 1.4 million, in July recorded its first traffic death in a year keeps hopes high for coordinated efforts such as Vision Zero. “Helsinki’s recent success shows Vision Zero is possible in a winter city with a complex, multimodal transportation network like Edmonton, which is why our ongoing commitment to Vision Zero is more important than ever,” Islam said. Key to that – Islam, Windover and Singhal agree – is for drivers to simply follow the rules: “This means driving the speed limit, being aware of your surroundings, paying attention to signs and signals, and always looking for vulnerable road users like pedestrians,” Islam said. “It’s always been a long-standing position that speed kills people,” Windover said. “If people choose to speed, they’re taking their own safety and the safety of other road users into their own hands.” Following the rules is “what works,” Singhal says. “Follow the speed limits, obey everything, including safety in the vehicle, including related to impairment, seat belts, all of that stuff,” he said. “When people obey the rules, the roads are safer for everyone.
