All of us who drive, or have been passengers in cars, remember a close call on the road that continues to haunt us.
A recent incident still leaves me in a cold sweat. I was driving on the Queen Elizabeth Way between Hamilton and Toronto, when I momentarily dozed off at the wheel. I was jolted awake by the vibrations of rumble strips. I pulled over just to get my heartbeat back to normal. Did those rumble strips save my life? I do not want to know what would have happened if they had not been there. So why aren’t these relatively inexpensive safety features on all major highways?
Neil Arason’s No Accident: Eliminating Injury and Death on Canadian Roads reminds us that Canada’s highways are a killing field. Consider that since 1950, more than 235,000 people have died on Canada’s roads and that from 1999 to 2008...
Patrick Luciani is a senior fellow at the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto and coauthor of XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame, published by the University of Toronto Press (2011).
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