Our City, Our Podcast

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We know where services and programs impact you, so let's talk about them together. We'll learn from the people behind the scenes and get to know our city a little better from the City of Winnipeg.

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This is our city, our podcast. This podcast is recorded in treaty one territory, the home and traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Ininew, and Dakota peoples and the National homeland of the Red River Metis. We acknowledge that our drinking water comes from Shoal Lake, 1st Nation in Treaty Three Territory.

Speaker 1 0:31
Hi, I'm Natalie
Speaker 2
and I'm Shannay

Speaker 1 0:33
And today we are talking to Rebecca Peterniak. She is the Road Safety Management engineer here at the City of Winnipeg.

Speaker 2 0:40
And we just want to give everyone a heads up that in this episode today, we do discuss road safety, including discussions of injuries and deaths on Winnipeg roads. So we want to make sure you're taking care when listening.

Speaker 1 0:52
Well, thanks for joining us. Rebecca, road safety such an important universal topic. You know, as an example I know for my own daughter, when we were teaching her ABCs and how to count, we were also talking about looking both ways before you cross the road. Yeah, I'm kind of thinking that's a common way for a lot of us to get into road safety. But how about you? How did you actually come to work in this field?

Speaker 3 1:18
Yeah, well, like your daughter. I think my exposure to road safety started very young, but I didn't know at the time I'd make a career out of it. Both my parents spent their careers with the Winnipeg Police Service. My dad worked in traffic enforcement, so he did like collision investigation, collision reconstruction. So I think their worlds led to some really intense like traffic safety lessons for my brother and I as kids. My mom tells this story when they were teaching me to cross the street, and they'd send me off on my own, and my pigtails would be just flapping back and forth, hitting me in the face because my head was just on a swivel the whole time when I crossed the street, right but then years later, I started taking Engineering at the University of Manitoba, and on a drive home one day, I asked my friend, like, who times traffic signals like, that seems so fascinating like and I'm stuck in this traffic jam so and he said, I think civil engineers do So from there, I started taking some courses in transportation, and just got really into road safety, because it was the one field where I really saw a direct link for how I could impact people's quality of life. So you know, if I can design a road so that someone can get to work or get to school or visit their friends more safely, then I have a big impact on their quality of life, and that feels like a meaningful day at the office, right? So, yeah, after I finished my studies, I worked as a road safety consultant, doing projects across Canada and internationally, and eventually found my way back home to working on road safety in Winnipeg.

Speaker 2 3:02
Awesome. Yeah, well, what you do is obviously really important work, and we're going to get into more of those details on how that's done. But I think it's also important to ground this conversation in recognition that any work around safety inherently recognizes there's a safety need, because there are, unfortunately, people who have been hurt or killed. Can you Can we touch on that a little bit?

Speaker 3 3:23
Yeah, totally. I think, like every time the serious incident occurs where someone's injured or unfortunately loses their lives, it underscores the need to continue the work we're doing, and we still have a lot of really important work to do. So when we think about the magnitude of the problem. We also have to think about our role and our ability to fix the problem and solve the problem. I once gave a presentation on road safety and asked the audience, you know, who has been affected by a serious collision. Either you're in a collision or, you know, someone who has and everyone in the room raised their hands, and that was like a really impactful moment for me to just see how big the magnitude of the problem is. But it's a problem that we can solve. Like it. There are solutions to this problem, and so I think it's important to focus on that, focus on there being solutions, and just take some time to get there.

Speaker 1 4:22
The culture around road safety. Is it changing? Is the expectation and the education of our transportation engineers different than it was, say, 50 years ago?

Speaker 3 4:35
I think definitely, actually, there's kind of been this traditional approach to road safety, that believed that, you know, if everyone just followed all the rules of the road, if everyone knew all the rules followed them, that we wouldn't have a safety problem. And so that placed the primary responsibility on the road user, and focused a lot on education that we can get our way out of this. Problem through just educating everybody. But the problem with that is that it fails to recognize that humans are fallible, like we make mistakes. We all have different capabilities, and sometimes we just choose not to follow the rules, and we shouldn't die or be seriously injured because of any of those things. So the current approach recognizes human factors, recognizes human limitations, and instead of placing primary responsibility on the road user, it focuses on a shared responsibility. So responsibility is shared between engineers that design the roads, elected officials who craft and approve policies and legislation, people who design vehicles, manufacture vehicles and the road user themselves too. Like education still has an important role, but it's more shared and primary responsibilities placed on the system designers, the people who actually build our road network. Another difference is that there was a former kind of belief that injuries are just something that are inevitable, something that is just going to happen, but now the current belief is that they are preventable. And so I think it's important to start from a place where there is a solution to the problem, not that it's just a reality that we have to live with. And so there's been a lot of work done to kind of shift that culture within the industry itself. But I think a lot of the public perceptions is still maybe more aligned with the traditional approach, the desire to see just us educate our way out of the problem, and so there's more work to do to kind of shift culture publicly, so that we're all pulling in the same direction.

Speaker 2 6:51
So if I've got this right, when we hear someone say, citizens just need more education on the rules of the road, the new approach to road safety would say it's more complicated than that? Totally.

Speaker 3 7:01
Yeah, education is still part of the puzzle, for sure, but there's so much more. Maybe you've heard the term Vision Zero before, and that's kind of where we're going. It's like our long term goal where nobody dies or is seriously injured on our roads, and the safe system approach is how we're going to get there. So the safe system approach says that there's many different layers to our transportation system, and it's by strengthening all those layers that we prevent serious injuries and fatalities. So that includes how we plan land use, how our roads are physically designed, the speeds that people travel and how speed limits are set and enforced the vehicles that are on the road, the type of technology that they have, road user behaviors, and then even post crash care. So once a collision happens, is our health care system set up in a way to prevent that collision from resulting in a really severe injury. So education is, for sure, part of the solution, but there's so many other parts, and there's a greater focus now on building up all those layers as part of our road safety plans.

Speaker 2 8:11
Yeah, okay, would this be a good time to clarify how your team defines safety?

Speaker 3 8:19
Sure, yeah, I think so. So the traditional approach to road safety was really focused on all collisions, like, how do we stop crashes from happening? And that could be anything from a minor fender bender that results in property damage only to something that results in an injury, but our focus now is really more on injury prevention. So what are the most severe events that are happening, the ones that result in injury or death, and how do we understand all the details about those events to prevent them from happening?

Speaker 1 8:51
The City actually has a generally new roadmap on how we are going to achieve these safer roads. Probably a good time to remind folks of the recent strategy adopted on road safety, sure, yeah,

Speaker 3 9:03
yeah, it's very exciting. In 2019 Council allocated some additional funding to road safety, and we used part of that funding to create this road map. So the Winnipeg road safety strategic action plan was approved by council in 2022 and like you said, it's meant to serve as a roadmap for how we should be investing in road safety over the next five years.

Speaker 2 9:27
So in that safe systems approach that you just mentioned, where are the areas Winnipeggers are going to see your team focusing on.

Speaker 3 9:35
So the plan has five focus areas, and those focus areas came from what collision data told us was the biggest problems in Winnipeg, and also what the public and stakeholders told us we should focus on so those are pedestrians, cyclists, signalized intersections, speed and then that road safety culture piece, how do we shift awareness and get everyone on the same. Page. So within the plan, there's 67 actions within all of those focus areas for us to start work on over this five year period.

Speaker 1 10:10
So this is really, you know, a fascinating time in our in our history. Is this the first time we've had a dedicated road safety branch?

Speaker 3 10:18
It is the first time. Yeah. So as part of approving the Road Safety Strategic Action Plan, Council also approved funding for three new positions to create a road safety branch within Public Works and the transportation division. So it's very, very exciting. So our role is really to serve as guardians of the road safety plan, to ensure that it's getting implemented, and then we also play a role in helping to institutionalize road safety in the city, because we're not the only people responsible for Road Safety. Almost everyone in transportation impacts safety on the road network. So as opposed to centralizing anything to do with road safety to our branch, our role is really about building capacity across the city of Winnipeg, so that we're all playing the part we need to play.

Speaker 1 11:07
You mentioned these, these three new positions, can you tell us a little more about them? Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 3 11:11
So my position is the road safety management engineer, which manages the branch. We also have another road safety engineer who is responsible for implementing a lot of the engineering based actions in the plan. And then a brand new role for the transportation division is a road safety outreach coordinator. So they're responsible for Road Safety engagement, education, outreach, kind of areas of work that we haven't typically done within public works before, but we're really excited to have this focus as part of our team.

Speaker 2 11:47
So coming back to your earlier reflection on impact, what does the road safety plan set out to achieve?

Speaker 3 11:53
So it sets a long term vision, which is kind of based on Vision Zero. So it says that, you know, nobody in the long term should be seriously injured or killed on our roads. And it sets a short term goal that in this five year period, we want to see serious injuries and fatalities reduced by 20% and every year we monitor our progress toward that goal. So how are we doing in terms of collisions this past year and over the past few years, and also, how many actions, and what actions have we been working on, and what's our progress like? There amazing.

Speaker 2 12:25
I've always wondered how our transportation planners respond when a fatality happens on our roads. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Speaker 3 12:36
Sure. Yeah, we're mostly concerned with monitoring longer term trends and finding commonalities between them. Fatalities, unfortunately, can happen anywhere, and there can be issues with jumping in right away to address a location where a fatality occurred, when that specific situation could have happened at the identical intersection down the street, or a similar street, you know, in another ward of the city. So the focus is really on understanding what are the common factors between fatalities and serious injuries, so that we can take those lessons and apply them across the whole network. However, we do have plans to create a new fatal collision and injury collision Review Committee, where we'd have multiple stakeholders get together a few times a year and discuss in depth, you know, what were the contributing factors to this particular incident? What can we learn from it? So we hope that that'll just help get us more timely and in depth information.

Speaker 1 13:38
So one of the things we love to do on this podcast is talk about what's unique in Winnipeg, or explore if there are facets there, and wondering if there are any unique elements to road safety in our city. One element might be, unlike other Canadian cities, we don't have a defined network of freeways. Like is that a space you can find a positive or a negative effect.

Speaker 3 14:03
Yeah, I think that is a unique element about Winnipeg, and it definitely impacts safety, because it means that a lot of our roads are trying to do so many things at once. They're trying to move a lot of vehicular traffic while also serving pedestrians and cyclists, people who are just trying to get across the street from their neighborhoods. So we have a lot of conflicting needs at a given intersection, which results in a lot of safety concerns. And I think that's why signalized intersections came up as one of our focus areas in the plan, because that's where so many different road users converge, and that's where we see a lot of severe incidents happening.

Speaker 2 14:42
So how does Winnipeg compare to other North American cities? In the case of per capita, number other comparable metrics, do we have more or less people hurt or killed on Winnipeg roads?

Speaker 3 14:52
I think a lot of people may have that question, but it's actually not something that we focus a lot on. Our goal is to get Winnipeg to zero. Zero. Our goal over the next five years is to reduce those numbers by 20% so we're really looking at how we compare to ourselves over time. How we're comparing to another city may not be very useful, because there's just differences in how our roads are designed. So our preference is to really focus on our goal and ourselves, and it could be misleading. You know, if we find we're doing better than some cities, we don't want that to take us, take our focus away from where we need to go.

Speaker 1 15:30
That's, yeah, that's, that's a really interesting shift in thinking. Now there are, however, you know, kind of looking forward into the future around the globe, there are some broader technological trends in transportation that could be changing the game on our roads. Are there? Are there certain technologies trends that you are keeping an eye on?

Speaker 3 15:53
For sure, there's actually an action in the road safety plan for us to monitor the safety impacts of micro mobility devices, so things like E scooters, e bikes, and that's a growing trend. Like across Canada right now, we're seeing other peer cities doing the same. So there's lots of information being shared amongst ourselves, and there's a lot of unique elements about E scooters and E bikes that we need to understand. There's not great data on the types of crashes they're in and kind of injury trends, because it's such a new mode, there may be under reporting of those types of collisions. And we need to understand, you know, how does our infrastructure need to change? How do the roads need to change so that these types of modes have safe places to operate? Where is a safe place for them to operate. What kinds of policies, legislation do we need to regulate those types of vehicles? So there's a lot of questions that are being asked right now to figure out, you know, as the fleet changes on the road network, how does our infrastructure need to change to support that?

Speaker 2 16:58
Yeah, that's really interesting. Like, would those..would bike lanes be used for different types of transportation? Or, you know, I can't imagine we're building out more infrastructure every single time a new..

Speaker 1 17:09
scooter lane, or whatever scooter lane.

Speaker 3 17:13
Or, yeah, lots of questions like that, do they belong in a bike lane, on a sidewalk, on a roadway, on a multi use path? Are the bike lanes that we're building now suitable for them? Do we need to change the way we're building a bike lane so that it better accommodates, you know, how fast they go, or things like that? So lots of questions and something we're keeping an eye on that's super interesting.

Speaker 1 17:34
Well, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2 17:38
Yeah, great thoughts, really great answers, and I think this one should be the easiest answer, hopefully the easiest question we'll ask you today, and it's what we ask everyone. And would you like to share something about Winnipeg that you wish everyone knew? It can be work related, but it doesn't have to be.

Speaker 3 17:57
Yeah, good question.
I think one thing I'm really grateful for about Winnipeg is how much nature and park space and access to nature we have. Like, I live in a very central neighborhood, and within 10 minutes, I can be on the river, on a path, not run into anyone except maybe a couple deer. And I think that's just such a cool, cool aspect about Winnipeg, yeah.

Speaker 1 18:22
I love that. Don't tell Toronto.

Speaker 1 18:27
Brilliant. Thanks so much. Thank you

Speaker 1 18:31
Coming up on the next episode of our city, our podcast, shannay, are you ready to talk about snow?

Speaker 2 18:36
Like, who is ready to talk about snow? But I think it's coming, whether we like it or not. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1 18:43
We'll talk snow removal, we'll talk potholes. We've got the guy who manages it all. Michael Cantor is the Manager of Streets Maintenance, and will be here next time. And before we go, we'd love to hear from our listeners what programs and services impact you most. Email us at city-podcast@winnipeg.ca with suggestions for future episodes. Thanks for listening.