Over a 5-year period, motorists injured pedestrians at exactly one quarter of all intersections in central Montreal. Those of us alarmed over unsafe streets will not be surprised by this finding. But I suspect that many of those setting traffic policies will be. That is because the roads agency in Montreal operates under a policy of fixing collision "black spots", where a "black spot" is an intersection with eight or more collisions in a 5-year period. Amazingly, seven motorist pedestrian collisions in 5 years that's one in every 260 days is not enough to brand an intersection as dangerous. The black spots approach fixes only 1% of the intersections where a motorist hits a person. The unspoken premise of this policy seems to be that a high frequency of collisions is evidence of design problems unique to that intersection. However, this report suggests that faults in the road design are not site-specific but are nearly universal. (Author/publisher).
Abstract