Latest cycling death in Montreal puts spotlight back on truck safety
CBC
After years of calling for more to be done to protect cyclists and pedestrians from heavy trucks, advocates say governments in Quebec and Ottawa are not taking the issue seriously enough, and they're hoping the death of a cyclist in Montreal this week will serve as a wake-up call.
On Tuesday, a 66-year-old man riding a bicycle was killed after being hit by a dump truck in Montreal's Villeray neighbourhood.
The victim was heading south on Saint-Laurent Boulevard — the same direction as the truck — and the collision happened after the driver turned right on de Liège Street.
Magali Bebronne, the program director for Vélo Québec called the latest fatal collision "devastating" but said that "sadly it's not surprising."
"I would say, at this point, it's even predictable," she said.
According to Bebronne, an analysis of public data from the province's automobile insurance board (SAAQ) carried out by local cycling advocates revealed that 47 per cent of cycling deaths between 2011 and 2019 involved heavy vehicles.
"[This is] despite the fact that these trucks represent only four per cent of the vehicles on our road," Bebronne said.
In 2020, one cyclist was killed in a collision in Montreal. Tuesday's victim was the fifth of this year.
Her group has urged elected officials to follow the lead of the city of London, which bans heavy trucks from circulating in certain areas if they do not meet a set of security standards.
"As long as we'll have trucks and vulnerable users with no protection riding the same streets with huge blind spots, we can expect these collisions to keep happening unfortunately."
Bebronne and others have repeatedly said the way trucks are built should be regulated to make sure they are a better fit for dense, urban areas. She says these kinds of changes are major overhauls that take time.
"Yet we are doing nothing to change what will be on our roads a decade or two from now," she said.
"We are not working on this. There's no leadership from Transports Quebec and Transport Canada that are in charge of setting the standards.
It gets you wondering about how many deaths it will take."
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