The City's transportation division has won the prestigious Mavis Johnson Award for their Burnaby Road Safety Network Screening Study with the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Greater Vancouver Section. This award celebrates technical excellence for transportation projects focusing on improving safety for all road users. Winning projects are judged for their technical complexity and innovation, importance to society, and quantity of work- as well as coming in on time and on-budget.
The Screening Study is a comprehensive road safety review of the entire city which identifies locations with the highest risk of collisions, and proposes mitigation measures to help reduce the frequency and seriousness of accidents. To build this inventory of accident-prone areas, a heat map was created to visualize high-risk locations and corridors. While this strategy is commonplace across municipalities, Burnaby’s project was able to identify entire “critical corridors”, in addition to simply mapping individual hot spots. This distinction is important, as traffic accidents are rarely the result of a single factor. The Study garnered top marks for analyzing whole accident-prone corridors and identifying an ‘ecosystem’ of risk factors, instead of looking at only a single pain point.
The Study ran from June to December of 2022, and was completed successfully in a compact timeline. The improvements which it identified are planned to be Transportation Road Safety Improvement Projects under Burnaby’s 2023-2027 Capital Plan.