Fixing University Avenue
TL; DR: We need your help in pushing the Region to implement safer pedestrian crossings.Get started by showing your support for signalized crossings at Lester and Sunview in our petition here.
Vision Zero Waterloo is an initiative by Eddy Ionescu, Yu Chen Hou, Deon Hua, and Bilal Akhtar.
At 10:45 pm, on Friday, January 25, on a cold night like any other, a 19-year-old student crossed University Avenue at Lester Street, and ran over four lanes of traffic. He was critically injured by a passing vehicle, and died a few days later.
On June 18, 2018, in broad daylight, a 49-year-old pedestrian was hit-and-run by a vehicle while crossing University at Sunview — 100 metres to the east of Lester.
In March 2013, in response to another pedestrian injury, Waterloo Regional Police set out to take action. By “cracking down” on pedestrians via $50 jaywalking tickets. Clearly, that hasn’t worked — to this day pedestrians can regularly be seen crossing this dangerous stretch of road.
University Avenue, also known as Regional Road 57, was designed as an arterial to quickly move vehicles across Waterloo. However, its location near the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University has brought an explosion in student-focused development over the past decade, and is now home to over a dozen high-rise student accommodations. The current intersection was built for a different era, when Lester Street was nothing more than a sleepy road through rows of detached homes and bungalows.
Many student-focused businesses can be found on both sides of University Ave. To the south is Linden Square, home to several restaurants popular with students. To the north is University Plaza, which has the only grocery store within walking-distance, and Brixton, a nightclub.
In addition, there are bus stops on both sides of University Avenue at Sunview, that with each serving five GRT routes, are vital for students in accessing campus, Uptown Waterloo, Westmount Plaza, Conestoga Mall, and Kitchener.
The result is that thousands of students, with the vast majority not owning cars, are living, studying, dining, walking to transit, and grocery shopping using road infrastructure that was built to move cars quickly — not people.
The diagram below shows the extent to which, for thousands of students, all of these activities are separated by a four-lane arterial road that requires them to walk an additional 400 metres (about 5 minutes) just to be able to safely cross.
A quick look at Waterloo Regional Police’s data reveals that the vicinity of Lester at University has been the site of many vehicular accidents since 2011, the oldest extent of available published data.
The University at Lester and Sunview intersections averaged about 5 personal injury and hit-and-run incidents a year.
Every time such a tragic pedestrian accident occurs, we ask ourselves, why does this keep happening?
The answer lies in University Avenue’s original design and classification. As a major arterial road, the Transportation Association of Canada recommends a minimum spacing of 400 metres (Page 164), with no consideration of pedestrian needs in urbanized areas. The Region has stuck to this rule in denying that a traffic light is needed.
However, with 20 000+ cars passing through the intersection on a daily basis (Waterloo Region) and at least a thousand pedestrians either detouring or jaywalking across in an 8-hour period, following the guidelines of the Ontario Traffic Manual, a signalized intersection could be justified at Lester, even if mid-block, in the name of pedestrian safety (pages 87–88).
There is a precedent for violating the 400m guideline for pedestrian needs. Just a couple hundred metres east along University Ave, the signalized crosswalk across the Lazaris School of Business is 110m from the closest signalized intersection on the east side (Hazel St), and 180m from the closest one west (Albert St). To the west, a signalized crossing is about 200m west of Phillip St as to allow users of the Laurel Trail to continue straight instead of detouring to Seagram or Phillip.
Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate deaths and injuries for all users of the road — pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. While the intersection of University at Lester clearly warrants a traffic light, there are countless other intersections that although less-busy, still require pedestrians to excessively detour or jaywalk, putting themselves and others in a dangerous situation.
But we need your help in pushing the Region to implement safer pedestrian crossings. Let’s help make zero road deaths a reality in Waterloo. Get started by showing your support for signalized crossings at Lester and Sunview in our petition here.
