A retired chemical engineer is challenging Red Deer drivers to reduce the number of motor vehicle collisions on city streets.
Earlier this month, Doug Taylor contacted a variety of local schools, school boards and community organizations to enrol them in a three-year contest showing that collisions could be avoided if more drivers changed a few bad habits and developed some good ones.
Among them, Taylor encourages drivers to leave a respectful distance between each other’s vehicles, to watch more carefully for traffic and pedestrians approaching from the right, to use their seatbelts properly and to make sure the interiors of their trucks and cars are free of loose objects.
So far, the Golden Circle and the Red Deer College Students Association have signed up for the challenge, which begins on Jan. 1 and includes some incentive money to give the participants access to safety programs and training tools.
The biggest obstacle so far has been collecting detailed statistics on collisions within the City of Red Deer, says Taylor, operator with a silent partner of Safer Vehicle Use Ltd.
“We wouldn’t think of playing hockey without keeping score.
“Yet we participate in what are the most dangerous activities for most people . . . without generally knowing whether our level of effort is consistent with a high likelihood of avoiding an undesirable outcome,” he writes in material published for the challenge.
Taylor has compared those statistics that he has been able to collect with similar data from other cities, including Calgary, Edmonton and Castle Rock, Col. He chose Castle Rock because of the high level of collisions statistics that it had published on its web pages.
While the City of Red Deer publishes an annual traffic report, it does not include details about why various collisions occurred or whether the drivers involved were local or from out of town, said Taylor.
He would also like to see statistics comparing collisions rates and causes between drivers who live in various parts of the city, based on their postal codes.
Those details would help educate drivers and therefore prevent similar actions in the future, he said.
Taylor’s interest in traffic safety stretches back 60 years to a pair of collisions in which his cousin and his aunt were killed. The cousin, aged three at the time, was struck down by a vehicle that had rounded the corner just as he was crossing the road. His mother was killed in a subsequent collision involving the police vehicle in which his aunt and uncle were riding while following the ambulance to the hospital.
Years later, Taylor said felt compelled to take action after being tailgated in Edmonton by a drunk driver on New Year’s Day in 2002.
Visit www.leadrs.ca for information about the Red Deer Driver’s Challenge.
bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com