Highways to heck

>> The battle to control Quebec's speed demons

by GEORGE MADDUX

They died at a Granby level crossing after unsuccessfully trying to gun it past a speeding train. They died getting backsided on the roads near Chicoutimi. This year, like every other, Quebec's highway motorists got smashed, crushed and wiped out in every conceivable way, but in greater numbers than usual.

Any driver who ventured onto Quebec's highways this summer witnessed the deadly traffic conditions: motorists made like Jacques Villeneuve, pushing their Accords and Fireflys faster and harder, weaving, speeding, flying dangerously from lane to lane with unprecedented abandon. According to the Quebec government, the increase in fatal accidents on Quebec roads breaks a longtime trend, which saw number of deaths steadily decrease since 1973.

Some blame the Sureté du Québec. That's because, unlike the MUC officers whose $57,000 salary they wanted to match, the SQ didn't protest by wearing acid-wash jeans, they simply refused to referee the roads. In September of 1999, before the SQ work slowdown, the provincial police handed out over 25,000 tickets. During the slowdown in June, they doled out just over 400. The SQ and PQ finally collided for good just before Labour Day, when Public Security Minister Serge Ménard, possibly annoyed by the $40-million in lost ticket revenues, accused the union of being responsible for the increased deaths and injuries.

However, animosities were recently set aside when the two sides came to a contract agreement. Pointed fingers turned into handshakes and victims of police neglect were quickly forgotten.

Carefree highways
But one of Quebec's leading independent experts on road safety denies that the 3,700 SQ officers were responsible for this year's three per cent jump in highway deaths and five per cent acceleration in injuries.

"Most drivers didn't even know that the SQ wasn't on the roads," says Guy Paquette, director of road safety research at the University of Laval at Quebec. "From the moment drivers heard about [the 11-month strike] through the media in the middle of the summer, it might have had a small effect but even then it was minimal."

In Quebec's subtle semiotics of signage, the posted limit of 100 kilometres an hour--adopted during the '70s oil crisis and now one of the slowest in the world--hasn't been taken seriously for a long time, according to Paquette. "That's considered unreasonably slow and is not considered credible for a second," says Paquette, who points out that the average speed on Highway 40 is 118 km/h. "If we consider 118 as not particularly dangerous and the government raises the limits, people will start doing 135. We don't have enough police to control that kind of situation."

Another problem with a wink-wink speed limit occurs when it's applied to the more populated urban areas. "Considering the accepted margin of tolerance, that means that in the city where the limit is 50 km/h drivers think they can do 60, 65. These cases pose much higher dangers," he says.

Warming to photo radar
Paquette says his last ticket came in 1970, a result of Quebec's short-lived photo-radar project, the world's first. It was also the first photo-radar project to be scrapped by public outrage. Now Paquette is among those applauding its return in a pilot project starting next June. This time he doesn't envision the plan accelerating into a brick wall of popular disapproval. "People don't like it if it's used as a new instrument of taxation. A SAAQ poll, however, shows that most are in favour if it's only used to punish truly dangerous driving," he says.

With the SQ back on the road, Paquette has joined the convoy of critics urging the force to modernize its oft-criticized accident report forms. Currently officers are offered a list of 59 possible accident causes, one of which they tick off.

Paquette also points out that the 10 roving inspectors employed by the force to analyze accident scenes is woefully lacking in comparison to say, Ontario, which has a team of 130 doing the same grisly work. He's lobbying for a system employed in France where teams of experts from various domains conduct in-depth studies on everything from fender benders to 18-car pile-ups. "We know there is never only one cause for an accident and it takes a lot of energy to find it out what happened." :

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