Proceedings of the Subcommittee on
Transportation Safety
Issue 4 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, March 25, 1998
The Subcommittee on Transportation Safety of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 3:35 p.m. to study the state of transportation safety and security in Canada and to complete a comparative review of technical issues and legal and regulatory structures with a view to ensuring that transportation safety and security in Canada are of such high quality as to meet the needs of Canada and Canadians in the twenty-first century.
Senator J. Michael Forrestall (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, we are fortunate to have with us today Dr. Navin, a professional engineer and a professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia. He is also a director of Hamilton Associates of Vancouver. He is accompanied by Ms Suzanne Hemsing, a transportation engineer with the same firm.
Please proceed.
Professor Frank P. D. Navin, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to introduce Ms Suzanne Hemsing, who works with me when I am working as a consultant. She has moved to Ottawa and will be doing road safety work in Ontario from now on. I also would like to be forgiven for an English-only report but I had to prepare it on very short notice, and my translation skills are extremely limited. I apologize for that.
I would like to highlight some of the main points in the report for you. The report is, by its nature, general. I have not gone into great detail. What I have attempted to do is outline some of the main issues.
If you would turn to page 1 of the report, the diagram at the top is a very simple diagram of the improvement in mobility since about 1970. You can see that the kilometres travelled, the number of vehicles on the road, and the amount of road we have, have all increased. In general, the amount of travel on the road has gone up about by 200 per cent since the 1970s.
If, on the other side, you take a look at safety, in some general measures such as deaths, serious injury and crashes, crashes and serious injuries have gone up. Crashes have gone up about 150 per cent since 1970. The only success we have had on road safety since the 1970s has been in the reduction of deaths, which is about 50 per cent. We in Canada are doing just a little better than most of the other western democracies.
When you put the numbers in here, the numbers become quite large, slightly less than 4,000 fatalities a year in Canada. In the United States, the number is approaching 50,000, and if you round the numbers up world-wide, you are getting up into numbers of about a quarter of a million people. That is very high.
Just as an aside, the automobile is about 100 years old. The number of fatalities in that 100 years is somewhere around 30 or 40 million, more than the population of Canada.
I went through the organization that was sent to me by the clerk and the first thing I want to speak about is the impact of technology on road safety.
My research, and some others in which I have been involved, would indicate that about half of the fatality saving has been as a result of safety technology. Specifically, the ones that we can measure from the data are the seatbelts, speed limit reductions, and on-board vehicle safety equipment. We know other things have influenced road safety but we cannot measure them in the national statistics. They include things like lighting of intersections and road-side devices that cushion and ease the roadside. We can measure those on site-specific bases, but on national statistics, we cannot do very much about that.
In the report, you will see I have a series of conclusions. I will not deal with those conclusions directly but will take highlights from them.
If you turn to the second page, paragraph 6 expresses one of the main points to be made in this presentation and that is that the ultimate objective of technology should be to reduce or even eliminate the risk of death and serious injury.
Risk is defined as a combination of the probability of being involved in a crash and the consequences of being involved in the crash once it occurs.
The committee asked me to look at a very interesting question dealing with safety culture. Much of what I will say is based on paragraph 8. You will have heard similar points from the people in Sweden; however, it bears repeating.
A question can be posed: Do you want a family member or a friend to die in a motor vehicle accident? The usual answer to that is no. This can be taken further. It leads ultimately to a policy of zero deaths or serious injury on the road as the only ethical solution and the only ethical policy for a government interested in road safety.
As the committee is aware, Sweden has adopted this zero vision. I will not dwell on that, other than to point out that by adopting this particular vision, it then allows the government, its agencies and others involved in road safety a clear focus as to what should be done. It moves road safety up in the agenda along with legislated requirements such as the environment, financial requirements and things of that nature.
I have gone into some detail in my paper on how this policy can be implemented for motor vehicle manufacturers. There is no reason why they cannot be given targets. Road designers and road builders can be given targets. People involved in public information programs can be given targets to counter some of the anti-safety ads which are now appearing to promote certain muscle cars.
The next question you asked me to look at was the issue of privatization. This is dealt with on page 4. As many of you know, I was involved in the safety review of Highway 407, which is the first electronic toll road and first privately-funded toll road in Canada in recent years.
It is my contention, after discussions with the builder of the toll road, Canadian Highways International Corporation, that a business case can be made for road safety on roads. It is a simple business case. Toll roads only make money when they are moving vehicles. If they cannot move vehicles through the system, they make no money. They can afford to invest in road safety to the point where the amount of money they lose in revenue equals the cost of cleaning up that accident. They have an economic incentive which is mathematically well-defined. In actual practice, the number is somewhat more rubbery.
It is important to note that highway departments and departments of transportation in government do not have this same financial imperative. They would deal with road safety mainly as a public policy issue and not necessarily as one of finance.
I have made some proposals which are appended to my brief. First, and probably most important, is that the stated aim of Canada and the Government of Canada should be to dramatically reduce or even eliminate road deaths and severe injuries on our highways.
Second, the emerging road safety culture should be supported by having a broad base of input into the safety aspects in the design of motor vehicles, roads and public information systems. This should be addressed to more than the professionals involved in these areas; there must also be public policy input.
Third, there should be an infrastructure program aimed at improving the safety of Canadian highways, not just the physical structure, but the fundamental safety of roads. Many of us who deal with road safety now feel that we have a large enough professional basis to be able to do those types of calculations in a meaningful way.
Fourth, there needs to be a proposal introduced that makes trucks more road friendly. By "road friendly," I mean they must be more friendly to the structure of the road insofar as trucks do not damage roads enormously, and trucks must be reasonably friendly to road-users. That brings up the issue of long trucks and issues of that nature. Canada has done very good work in this area through the Transportation Association of Canada and other groups. We are essentially leaders in this area.
Fifth, I recommend that this subcommittee convene a meeting of senior enforcement officials, including policing, legislative and judicial representatives to determine what this group considers important, enforceable and indictable. There is a certain fundamental frustration among many of the police and regulatory agencies that I must deal with in accident reconstruction. They say, "Why do we even bother with some of this? Because nothing ever happens."
Senator Roberge: Are you satisfied with the way statistics are kept? For example, how does methodology affect the statistics to which you refer?
Mr. Navin: The statistics I have provided are rubbery and can be stretched, but the trend is right and there is an increase. At the moment, the police, our main source of statistics, are no longer collecting much of the data. There has always been a question of the validity of the data. It even goes beyond that now. They are just simply not collecting some of it. That, in part, is the issue of community policing and other priorities being assigned to the police. I am not sure exactly how you get around that institutionally without your own dedicated force.
Senator Roberge: If you had a choice, would you be able to put on a piece of paper exactly the type of statistics that you would like to receive that would be meaningful for the proper keeping of statistics?
Mr. Navin: I think we could do a reasonable job on that. We could not do it exactly, because many of the questions you want to ask have not been asked yet. However, you can collect certain information. For example, for me as an engineer, what is desperately needed is fairly accurate location data. Where on the road did this thing happen? I can tell you that I have looked at accidents at railroad crossings and summed up all the accidents there to learn that some of them were actually on ramps leading to ferries that are 20 miles away. The precision of some of these things is terrible. My understanding is that the police are given about two days' training during a six-month basic training course dealing with how to fill in the report and road safety issues. That is it.
Senator Roberge: It might be interesting for us to receive your recommendations. If we can get that from different sources, eventually we could make recommendations to Statistics Canada that statistics should be kept differently, in a better way.
The Chairman: What is the best repository, the academic community or a government repository such as some federal agency?
Mr. Navin: I think when it comes to these sorts of statistics and the magnitude, the volume that has to be collected, the central government is the only agency with the national network and everything else to do that. We at university tend to be more project-oriented.
The Chairman: Insurance statistics, for example, would be picked to pieces by you for a project?
Mr. Navin: That is right.
The Chairman: It is only when you have a profile of police reporting, insurance reporting, academia having taken a look at some of this, that over a period of time, you can predict that there is a psychology about that strip of road, and there will be an accident 26 inches from the edge?
Mr. Navin: Just about, and that is what Ms Hemsing has done.
The Chairman: We look at some of these things that are going on, examining traffic jams in New York City and what creates a traffic jam.
Mr. Navin: That is the type of thing that we are after, but those of us who are interested in road safety are now attempting, with the statistical base, to develop mathematical models that allow us to forecast what will happen, and that is why the good data is needed. From good data, we can make reasonably good models, and then we can say what will happen. We can make a change mathematically and say that if we made this change to the road, we might be able to get this result. That is why you want, from an engineering standpoint, good data. You who deal with higher level issues than we do in the engineering level need it so you can look at public policy and see if you can afford it.
Senator Roberge: I was reading your brief at page 5, cross-border trucking. I want to be sure I understand. You mention the process of just-in-time manufacturing. Perhaps it is a language difficulty, but I do not understand what that means.
Mr. Navin: Under "Cross-border Trucking" on page 5, it reads:
The process of just-in-time manufacture is thought to add to the pressure of truck delivery systems. This may achieve improved manufacturing efficiencies at the expense of road safety.
Basically, the perception within the road safety industry is that the need to get trucks from one manufacturer to the next manufacturer where you are doing the warehousing in transit may cause some pressures to deliver on time. You no longer have three or four days between delivery and the time it is needed. It is needed right now.
Senator Roberge: I understand. I guess the same thing could apply to parcel delivery. It has increased substantially. Everyone orders it and wants to get it two hours later. The same scenario applies.
Mr. Navin: Yes, I believe that is so. Some of us, again, in general discussions, feel that things like road rage, this anger that you see on the roads, comes in part from these frustrations of deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
Senator Roberge: And you end up being stuck sometimes in traffic.
Mr. Navin: I have just come back from Bangkok where being stuck in traffic is a way of life, and I must admit that I did not see the anger on the road that I see here.
Senator Roberge: Perhaps they are used to it and accept it.
Mr. Navin: Perhaps we should have more congestion, and then we could learn to accept it as well.
Senator Roberge: Perhaps we would live longer as well.
Are you of the opinion that government should privatize roads in order for them to become safer?
Mr. Navin: I have only looked at this specifically in connection with Highway 407.
Senator Roberge: The concept can be applied elsewhere.
Mr. Navin: The concept sounds nice, but it needs reasonable study and thought by people involved in the financing and development of these roads, not just myself who happens to be interested in a very narrow part of the road.
Senator Roberge: At that point, your recommendation would be for us to dig a little deeper, and perhaps it could eventually become a recommendation from this committee.
Mr. Navin: I would think so, yes.
Senator Roberge: I will say that I agree with you personally that changes in cultural safety have to be achieved through goal-setting.
Senator Bacon: We have heard from many witnesses that fatigue and the increased competitiveness in the transport industry are a threat to safety on the roads. On the bottom of page 4, you mention hours of work and you mention experiments in Australia. What do you think is the solution to that?
Mr. Navin: This is one of the problems that is reasonably well defined and for which we have no good solutions. I know of major truck accidents in British Columbia where a trucker has driven from Saskatchewan, straight through to Vancouver, and then lost it in the last two kilometres, with tragic consequences. It becomes an enforcement issue. You also have the pressures of small business. I really do not know what you do about that.
Senator Bacon: What about Australia? Did they have any solutions?
Mr. Navin: Not that I know of, no. The road safety industry, the road people dealing with trucking, as I am sure you have heard, everybody is desperately trying to find a solution to this.
Senator Bacon: As trucking increases, one of my friends has suggested we should get as much freight as possible off the road and back onto the railroads.
Could that be one solution to be considered?
Mr. Navin: What you are doing is taking the exposure from one and moving it to the other and, at the moment, the exposure from rail lines is better than the exposure from trucking.
Senator Bacon: Would you like to see the road accidents investigated by a national safety board? Would this improve safety? Would that make things better?
Mr. Navin: Would it make things better or would it make things worse? I am very impressed by the level and thoroughness of the accident investigations of road accidents by the NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board in the U.S. They do an exceptional job on the major road accidents. They have picked up some very interesting phenomena, such as the hydroplaning of trucks under some very unique conditions. There are issues of acid rain on limestone roads, which makes them very slick. They have picked up such problems and brought them to national attention, which then allows people like myself in British Columbia to go out and look at some of the unexplained crashes and say, now, could this have been a possible answer.
That would be one way of focusing national knowledge and helping to disseminate that knowledge. A board could actually examine some of the more serious crashes find out what happened, what went wrong, and what could be made right. I think under those conditions, a board would be very worthwhile.
At the moment, there is a small group out of the Transport Canada's directorate of motor vehicle safety which actually do accident reconstruction but mainly from the standpoint of the vehicles. I was once the coordinator of that team at the University of British Columbia, and we have looked at such things as propane fires, air bags, side impacts, and all sorts of problems. I would say yes, most definitely a safety board is desirable.
Senator Adams: I wish to ask you a little more about accidents. Every time we have a snowstorm we hear on the radio how many cars have piled up. Have you done much work on what is causing accidents on the highways? We hear about problems with drunk driving. Especially in Canada, we have problems on the roads and mostly involving big trucks. Some people are in rush; they wish to pass a truck and they do not notice the other car coming the other way. In the old days, and perhaps it is still the same, the big trucks would give you some kind of signal that there was no oncoming traffic and then, if you are behind a big truck, you know it is safe to pass.
I am familiar with living in the Arctic and in the cold weather. Driving on snow is not the same as driving on a paved road. It only takes a second to have an accident. Sometimes people pass me at over 100 kilometres an hour in deep snow, and they see another car coming up and they cannot stop. Now my son is 18 and he received his driver's licence last summer. He never thought about the conditions of driving in snow. The teachers told him not to drink and drive, to slow down around the corners and things like that, but they did not tell him about ice and snow or freezing rain or black ice. He does not know a thing about that kind of driving. It is not only the driver's fault, since he may not be familiar with the highway on which he is driving.
Are you familiar with that sort of situation?
Mr. Navin: As Senator Adams knows, I trained in Arctic warfare. I learned to drive in an open pit mine near Asbestos, Quebec, on the very fine dust in the mine, so I thought all roads were slippery until I got onto a paved road and found they were not.
The Australians have started to use simulators in driver training. It is very interesting. I tried the simulator, and we had it down to what we thought would be the equivalent of ice, and it was very good. Having spent a great deal of time driving on ice, it worked very nicely. Things like black ice we can simulate, and it is probably cheaper to have reasonably good simulators to simulate that.
One of the problems of the local custom of signalling to allow you to pass is those only work for people who know the custom. We have had some very tragic accidents. A relative of one of my graduate students from Ghana came here and drove in the spring. Early one morning he went to meet a relative, hit black ice and was killed; he had had no idea what to do in that weather. As we get things like global tourism, people coming at all times of the year, we will run into those problems.
How you train people for that I do not know. I know that in British Columbia, where we have very much a vertical environment, it is a major problem. As I said, I know of a number of people who have actually been killed in that way. I personally have driven in that type of environment coming over a hill in a van, with the family, the dog and everyone else. You are on black ice. You pray that you will go straight because the alternative is to go over the side for a couple of hundred metres. Fortunately, I have been able to get away from those, but I would say this issue of black ice on the road is a real problem.
There will be a major problem in a few years from environmental issues as we get into the problem of not being able to use salt on roads that lead into fish-bearing rivers. Then we will have to find something else to use.
The road maintenance side and the problem of winter roads are really serious problems which are just beginning to be researched. We at the University of British Columbia have done some work on traction, big trucks on steep hills -- we have some steep hills -- trying to stop them, trying to start them going uphill, and just trying to brake them on the level. Yes, winter maintenance is a major problem, again, with solutions that are, at the moment, eluding us.
The Chairman: Are there surface implants that can be embedded in the road surface to give an electronic indication of the presence of black ice? When it is not there, there would be no indication and it would be off. Is there a physical or chemical situation that develops that can be harnessed to give warning?
Mr. Navin: That is an interesting question. I think you have been talking to one of the people who has been after me to test some paint that is temperature-sensitive. I know there are small, localized weather systems which forecast if there will be black ice in a small area. My understanding is that the researchers in Finland and Norway and Sweden have been working on this problem. Exactly what they have come up with, I do not know.
I know that on some upper-priced cars, there is a temperature gauge that actually reads the temperature fairly close to surface level. From that you can tell what the surface temperature is and whether you are at that magic point of just about zero degrees.
The Chairman: I want to come back on this whole question of targets. We see a continuation of the debate in Europe -- which we were all privileged to witness together in a sense -- about the uniformity of speeds.
We know, we have been shown quite graphically, that 1 million cars travelling at 150 kilometres per hour down a straight piece of road will never have accidents if they all maintain exactly the same speed. That is a target, but that is not necessarily a realistic target. It is a target which must go through many engineering innovations and technology developments, so people do not expect from it a result.
Can we set targets from which people can expect results, uniform speeds being one of them? Do you think we can set a uniform speed limit in Canada? Do you think we can have one-stop, highway-shopping for load limits and speed limits?
I say this seriously. We heard from the major truckers, very responsible national firms, assuring us that their truck drivers do not go over 100 kilometres an hour. They pass me -- and not one or two of them but dozens and hundreds -- going 120 kilometres an hour; they are in a hurry to go home. Companies are great but the drivers are another problem.
Regarding uniformity of speed, if you have a 30-wheeler going 90 kilometres per hour and another going 110, some poor fellow like me driving between them in a little, old car can get in trouble very quickly.
We spoke about tourism. When you move from here to the great highways of Europe, you can come over a blind hill going 150 kilometres per hour -- because there are 10 cars coming behind you at that speed -- and encounter a truck which has just barely crested the hill going barely 60 kilometres. What do you do?
Mr. Navin: You hope God is on your side and that you survive. That is all you can do.
The Chairman: Can we realistically set speed targets in this area?
Mr. Navin: I do not think we can set speed targets, at the moment, except for those on the major roads which we know we can set. For example, in British Columbia, when we design our roads, in some places, we knowingly have to reduce the geometric design criteria because we cannot afford to maintain the same level of design criteria that you can afford in Quebec or Ontario. The mountains are just too big, the hills too long.
Other than those exceptions, on certain classes of roads, yes, we should be able to set speed limits. My perception is that speeds in southern Ontario are much higher than those in similar driving conditions in and around Vancouver. Again, I know from personal experience that, in California, you just have to drive much faster again. It ties in with enforcement and what people expect.
If we do decide on something and get the regulators and the judiciary to agree, then you will have something about which people will realize you are serious. At the moment, there is a perception that certain parts of road safety -- in particular, speed -- are not serious issues. If you take a look at some of the motor vehicle ads now for some of the cars, they are basically anti-safety. They are based on speed and more speed.
You are looking at someone who thoroughly enjoys speed, but I am lucky. I have an airport runway where I can go and try out. I get my kicks, as it were, from driving on ice-covered parking lots and things like that. However, I do not drive at extremely high speeds on the road because I realize fully, and I discuss with my children and my wife all the time, the consequences if we go off the road. It is referred to by my children as the "curse of the engineer," always looking to see how this thing will fail and to see the consequences.
In answer to your question, on certain roads, on the major expressways, yes, we could have a national-type speed limit. When it comes to the arterial highways of the various provinces, they were all designed with slightly different criteria. You would have to check very carefully.
Senator Roberge: We are caught up in the system of provincial jurisdiction when establishing a national speed limit, for example. I understand there are discussions going on between the provincial ministers and the federal Minister of Transport to establish certain general guidelines and national standards. That seems to have been going on for a long, long time. What in your opinion are the barriers for setting that up? Would you have any idea?
Mr. Navin: I have no idea of the institutional barriers. As you know, I am isolated in a university --
The Chairman: You have to stop that, professor. You cannot isolate yourself in British Columbia. It is not that far away. I understand what you are saying.
Mr. Navin: Senator, I am looking to you to help me solve that problem.
The Chairman: Maybe we will build some better roads. I still have concerns about the standards. I have concern about one-stop shopping. I think a trucking firm should be able to call and say, "I need 27 licences. Here are my trucks, here are the axles, here are the weights, here is what I am carrying. Can I pick those up later this afternoon?" When they pick them up they would get a kit, including a licence plate that is valid in Saint John's, Newfoundland, through to Victoria, British Columbia.
If you have a 30-wheeler and it is loaded and it has those axles because it is carrying a heavy weight, and if you have 1,000 of them travelling at 90 kilometres per hour and 1,000 travelling at 110 kilometres per hour, is there an appreciable difference on wear and tear on the highway between those two groups of vehicles?
Mr. Navin: The speed is not an element in wear and tear on the physical road, but it may be a wear and tear on the road users themselves if they get in the way of that system, because the energy that you are dealing with increases as the square of the speeds.
The question was asked earlier as to how you might control things like national speeds. My last recommendation/proposal deals with policing and police efficiency. In my write-up, I deal with the issue of police enforcement, and the reduction of police enforcement in many of the road systems. The only way to expand that police enforcement is by electronic surveillance. With the new electronic devices, if you can get over the privacy aspect and all the other requirements, the instruments are there to be used. It is now just to find an acceptable method of using them.
We have found, in our experience in British Columbia, that the photo radar, for example, has a certain calming influence on the traffic. The traffic is moving at about the same average speed as it did before, there are only a few kilometres difference, but what is different now is the number of people who are exceeding, by more than about 10 kilometres an hour, the speed limit. That is down to about 4 or 5 per cent.
Senator Roberge: But, legally, can they give tickets?
Mr. Navin: Yes, but at the moment, because of the way our legislation is written, the owner of the car gets the ticket, not the driver.If you turn to your young daughter and say, "It was you who was speeding so you will pay the speeding ticket," then she gets no demerits and that is not quite fair. Usually now, what happens is you pay the ticket, and then charge them later, because of the legislation. Legislatively, it has to be set up correctly. I think most places ticket the vehicle.
There is a problem with trucks because of the tractor-trailer issue. The tractor can be owned by one company and the trailer by another.
Senator Roberge: It is a question of legislation.
Mr. Navin: One of the major places of traffic problems is at intersections. The intersection red-light cameras will be tried out in British Columbia.
The Chairman: What does that entail?
Mr. Navin: That entails monitoring an intersection, and then if somebody runs the red light, you take a picture of it and then that person gets a ticket for having run a red light. That is fairly easy to set up. One of our problems is people extending the green. Now you have to wait longer and longer before you go into some of the big intersections, because you are afraid someone is going to come whipping through.
The Chairman: Those intersections must be 100 yards across.
Mr. Navin: That is true. And in a place like Boston, you do not want to do that, because many drivers in Boston jump the green. There are some local rules of driving with which you must be familiar. I have worked in an area in Peru, and when I was there in 1989 I could not figure out the driving rules. Finally someone told me, "It is easy. If you are parallel to the river, you have the right of way; if you are not, you give way." It was a desert area, the river never had any water in it anyway, so I could never figure out where the river was. This is the problem of local rules which the stranger does not know.
Senator Bacon: During our hearings in Edmonton, we met with a representative of the Canadian Trucking Association who told us that the designs of the roads are unsafe and are sometimes identified as the cause of the accidents. He suggested that, knowing that, we should make the provinces adhere to a set of national safety standards. Do you have any opinion on that?
Mr. Navin: Yes. I would like to see some national safety standards, but, at the moment, we would be very hard-pressed to come up with a set of safety standards in geometric design that everyone agrees on.
In my experience, when I have looked at accidents, particularly at truck accidents, it is very rarely one thing that has gone wrong. It is usually two or three things that have gone wrong simultaneously, creating the problem. Very rarely can you isolate the vehicle. In all fatalities dealing with automobiles -- I am going from memory here -- I think the vehicle by itself is responsible for less than 1 per cent of the problems, the road by itself is responsible for 2 or 3 per cent at most, and the driver alone is responsible for about 50 or 60 per cent.
However, the combination of the road, the vehicle and the driver is responsible for over 33 per cent of all the crashes, so the road does come in there in a big and significant way. As a single factor, it is usually the driver and the road that is the problem. We are hoping that, electronically, we can overcome some of that. For example, I am sure you have been told by International Road Dynamics of Saskatoon that they have a device that recognizes a truck, takes the speed of the truck, and then if the truck is going too fast for the curve, it tells that truck specifically the speed it should travel. If the truck is doing the right thing, it does not tell it anything.
In design philosophy, we have something called "positive guidance" that states if you cannot build what a driver expects, you must tell the driver what to expect. This takes it one step further and says, "You only tell the driver what he needs to know when he needs to know it; otherwise, let him go."
Senator Roberge: Is that some sort of electronic system in the cab of the truck which would tell him in advance of the curve? Is that what you are talking about?
Mr. Navin: No, it is all in the roadside. Basically, there are sensors on the road that weigh the truck and check the axles. It knows roughly what type of truck is involved. From that information, you can identify it and see at what speed it can go around a particular corner because you have a radar gun or you can use the loops to pick up the speed. You then have a sign that is black most of the time. If it must, it lights up and gives a message. It also takes a picture so that if the trucker does not obey the sign, the trucker cannot say, "The sign did not come on." The sign warns, "I told you. It is your problem now." It is a very nice device. For a quarter of a million dollars, we can put it anywhere.
Senator Roberge: That is what you call "positive guidance"?
Mr. Navin: Yes. It is intelligent, positive guidance.
Senator Roberge: You said you were involved in the building and design of Highway 407. Can you tell us briefly what are the major differences are between the quality of the road manufacturing of that through-way versus the majority of the other roads in Canada?
Mr. Navin: I was involved in the safety review of Highway 407, not in the construction of Highway 407.
From an engineering standpoint, other systems of engineering are being used for the lovely structures that they built on it; the geometric design is pretty standard. The pavement design was very unique because they poured all three lanes at once with a special machine they got from Europe. When the machine was finished, the road was there; everything was done.
Other than the efficiencies that arise from mass production, which you can only get when you are building a road in that way -- and that is not the usual way governments build roads -- there is nothing exceptional about the road, other than the claim by the Canadian Highways International Corporation, as a result of the Highway 407 safety review, that it is the safest road in the world.
The Chairman: Yes, that is until there is a white-out and something else happens.
The reduction of fatalities must be a major goal here. Do you believe that it is possible to continue to reduce fatalities on the highway -- if not in absolute numbers, at least in proportion to miles travelled, or however you might want to measure it?
Mr. Navin: I think it is possible to get a further reduction in the fatalities on the road. In most of the economic analyses, that is what you should be addressing. One of the real major tragedies are serious injuries. Serious injuries are about 10 or 15 to 1 over fatalities.
The Chairman: Those are injuries with long-term consequences.
Mr. Navin: There are very long-term consequences and it is very devastating to the families involved. As a young man, I lost many of my friends to car accidents. This occurred in the 1950s and 1960s when it was expected. It is those who were badly injured that have been the real tragic cases. That is where we must put more effort, namely, where people are suffering from brain injuries or end up as quadriplegics, and so on.
In death, we have a mourning period. You miss your friends or your family, but there is a closure. However, with these very tragic, serious injuries, it is always there to confront you. That is where we should put some more effort and thought.
It is more difficult to do that, because the statistics are not as good. If you looked at it from the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia's standpoint, they are very concerned about those injuries. They are also concerned about the little fender-benders that occur in snowstorms. They represent from 40 to 50 per cent of their pay-outs. The percentage is higher in Quebec.
We can get a bit more on the fatality side, but we should start shifting our emphasis to serious injury.
The Chairman: Is there any one thing that you could suggest to us that might be either a major advantage or a major help in this?
Mr. Navin: We must take a look at accidents involving a single vehicle that is run off the road. About 37 per cent of fatalities result from that type of accident. I am not sure about the level of injuries, but these are the current accidents that are not getting very much attention if one is looking at specific types of accidents. In part, it is because they very hard to study. They are fairly infrequent. You must get out there quickly and find out the circumstances of how it came about so that you can then see what can be done about them.
There are certain things that can be done to the vehicle, but there are also certain things that can be done to the road to make the consequences of these things less severe.
The Chairman: Is education a factor here?
Mr. Navin: Education is always a factor, but it is probably one of the more difficult ones to do. The most cost-effective way is, first, enforcement; second, technology; and, third, education.
The pass mark is not 100 per cent. By definition, people will fail periodically. You do not want the consequences of failure or momentary inattention to be serious injury or death. It usually is not.
The Chairman: I think the committee shares the view that we must do more to foster a safety culture or a safety awareness. One way we can do that is through education. I am sure it is necessary to do that. I do not think you can ever stop trying to do it by way of education.
There are also mechanical ways to do it. Nothing wakes you up more than to run across 16 cables in the road. Often, you do not know what has happened to you. It wakes you fairly quickly.
I spent some time as a coroner. Apart from excessive amounts of drinking, inattention was one of the major factors involved in the fatal accidents that I investigated.
What would you think about calling a psychiatrist or someone from the proper discipline, whatever that would be, to explain the effects of splitting one's attention, such as carrying on a conversation on a telephone while driving?
Mr. Navin: In my own classes when I deal with that, I have them sing "Happy Birthday" and try to add up a column of numbers simultaneously. It cannot be done. One cannot switch one's attention quickly enough.
Most of the evidence on inattention due to driving while on the telephone is anecdotal at the moment. It is the perception that it is just not the right thing to do.
My own personal approach, and the approach that we take in Hamilton Associates is that our staff are not to have long conversations on the phone. It is simply to say, "I am here and I will be late for a meeting." We use the speed-dialling capabilities. Nobody has the cell phone numbers of any of our cell phones. Everyone must go through our business exchange. Our secretarial service is the information exchange point. There is no discussion between the client and the engineer on the cell phone.
We are in the road safety business; we thought it was the appropriate thing to do.
Senator Adams: I should like to ask about television commercials. We see commercials about death on the highway, however, you may watch a movie and the car rolls over and the guy walks away. Some people believe they can do the same thing.
Perhaps we need to increase the amount of road safety commercials on television. What is your opinion?
Mr. Navin: The government can put money into safety education and will simply come up against the problem of the motor vehicle manufacturers selling their cars based on speed and anti-safety. If Canada is to develop a safety culture, this must be done on a fairly broad basis. I see a safety culture emerging in highway design and highway arrangements, but I do not see that culture arising from the advertising of cars.
The people I know who are involved in the design of vehicles are concerned about life and limb. However, something happens between the engineering office and the sales office. I would say the cars we have now are much better than those of the past.
I have only had one major accident in my life where I rolled a car over in a ditch. Fortunately, I did it at the right time of life: I was young, healthy and indestructible. If I did it now, I do not think I would be so lucky.
Somehow we must achieve a culture of safety. This includes educational programs and also regulating what motor vehicle manufacturers are allowed to put on the screen. We have been successful with smoking regulations. There is no reason why government could not exercise more responsibility in the advertising of motor vehicles.
Senator Adams: Most drinking and driving advertisements will show a glass or many glasses of alcohol; they do not show the car going off in the ditch or hitting someone. They show nothing of the horrible accident that follows.
The Chairman: Mr. Navin, on behalf of the committee, I thank you for attending.
The committee adjourned.