When it comes to how much work the City of Burnaby had done to address safety concerns at a Cariboo Road crosswalk before a 15-year-old pedestrian was killed there, it depends on who you ask.
Coun. Pietro Calendino, chair of the city’s public safety committee, said engineering staff have been working for months on solutions – including a full traffic light.
“This is to ask council permission for funding the actual full traffic light that staff had been asking and working on for the last three months,” said Calendino at a council meeting Monday while introducing a staff recommendation for a full $450,000 traffic light at the crosswalk.
Last week, when the city announced it was installing a pedestrian-controlled flashing light at the cross-walk after three crashes there in four days, Calendino told the NOW the light had been one of a number of improvements staff had been working on.
“Staff was already working on those items, and they were going to come to us soon anyway, so the only thing we did is just advance it for a week or two,” he said.
All of that was news to Alexander John, comptroller at Cariboo Road Christian Fellowship, a church by the crosswalk.
Church member Bill Schulz had written a letter in July calling for a light at the crosswalk because of safety concerns.
Schulz and John weren’t satisfied with a report in November, four months later, that recommended speed control measures in the area and changes to the intersection of Cariboo Road and Cariboo Drive, 140 south of the crosswalk.
That report had determined traffic and pedestrian counts conducted at the crosswalk in October showed the crossing didn’t warrant a light.
During communications with the city’s engineering department after that, John had been told staff planned to take another look at the crosswalk sometime in 2018, but there was no indication the city was taking any more specifics steps in the interim, he said.
“Why wouldn’t we know otherwise if they were going to do a light?” John said. “They would have to communicate that, say ‘Hey, you know what, we’re working on this light or something that we’re talking about.’ I didn’t get any kind of communication if staff were doing that or working toward that.”
When a mom at the nearby Cariboo Hill child-care centre called for a light at the crosswalk as late as Dec. 5, the city’s response didn’t indicate the city was working on a specific solution then either.
“A recent review found that a traffic signal was not warranted due to the very low volume of pedestrians and vehicles crossing the roadway. However, we will try to obtain the details of the recent crash from the RCMP to gain a better understanding of the circumstances and to determine if any changes need to be made to enhance safety,” stated a Dec. 6 email from assistant director of engineering Doug Louie.
Louie told the NOW the crosswalk file had been kept open, but no specific solutions had been developed before the fatal accident.
“We knew there was ongoing concerns with the crosswalk, and I heard of some crashes … and we were thinking we might need to do something else,” Louie said. “So it was still active. We were going to look at it in 2018.”
When asked whether staff had, in fact, been working on a full pedestrian light for three months before last month’s fatal crash – as per his statement at Monday’s council meeting – Calendino said:
“Maybe the three months may not be the exact period of time, but they were asked to work on it.”
But if councillors or any other member of the public safety committee directed staff to look into a full traffic light or any other specific safety enhancements for the crosswalk before the fatal crash, there is no mention of them in the minutes of November’s public safety committee meeting.
The minutes, in fact, don’t mention the crosswalk at all but focus on the report about the Cariboo Road-Cariboo Drive intersection.
“The committee emphasized the importance of continuing to monitor the area for traffic volume,” state the minutes. “Staff advised they are considering measures that could be implemented in a long term.”
Calendino said directions to staff about safety improvements to the crosswalk “may not be in the record,” but they were made nonetheless.
“My position is that we had asked staff in November to continue looking at other solutions for the crosswalk, so maybe we made some assumptions, but our assumption is that leaving the crosswalk as it was not what we wanted.”
