Calgary council considers how building roads for fire trucks might make the city more dangerous

Calgary has actually made some of its roads more dangerous to pedestrians with a design that is meant to make homes safer from fire,Mayor NaheedNenshi said Monday.

"For a long time, we have been ensuring that the roads are wide enough for the rare occasion when an emergency vehicle has to get through," the mayor said.

"But we also know thatthose wide roadsencourage speeding, leading to more fatalities."

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The mayor's comments cameduring a meeting on risk management, which saw council members consider how well the city's policies match up with actual threats to the municipality and its residents.

Nenshi noted one Calgarian is hitand injured on city streets per day, on average, but that's not always reflected in the transportation decisions the city makes.

"We never talk about pedestrian risk when we're talking about how we design roads," he said.

Coun. Druh Farrell noted the relative risk to life and limb is far greater from car crashes than fromhouse fires, yet the city often focuses more on preventing the latter.

She cited a report based on Statistics Canada datathat puts an individual Canadian'sannual chance of death from a motor vehicle collisionat 109 in a million, versus just 7.9 from a house fire.

Farrell questioned whether the city has its priorities straight when addressing risks facing Calgarians.

For example, she noted that councilreceived a special briefing earlier this yearon the remote threat from the Zika virus, but has yet to see something similar on pedestrian injuries.

"I would love, at some point, at the beginning of a council meeting, a briefing on why 94 pedestrians have been hit and injured on city streets,"[so far this year]Farrell said.

"That is a real risk, but we just never hear that."

Nenshi noted it was just last week that an eight-year-old boy suffered serious brain injurieswhen he was hit by a truck while trying to cross a street in Cranston.

Hours after that collision, a 67-year-old woman was struck in Forest Lawn. She later died in hospital.

City manager JeffFielding saidthere is a certain "normalization of risk" when it comes to regular occurrences like people being hit by cars, and admitted city staff may sometimes "sort of skim over them" as a result, but would make a point of considering that more in the future.

"Yourpoint is well taken," he told Farrell.

"We'll take that under advisement."

'Human nature'

Farrell saidit's "human nature" to pay more attention to rarerisks, which tend to be scary orfascinating,while ignoringmore "mundane" ones, even if they pose a much greater threat, in reality.

Nenshi said he wasn't necessarily advocating for narrower roadways when he highlighted the fire truck example but wanted to illustrate that council needs to better consider a variety of risks when making decisions, rather than focusing on onethreat to the exclusion of others.

"These are questions and conversations that we have to have," he said.

"And it's important for council to think about that and determine precisely not just what is the appropriate level of risk,but which risks do we prioritize over other ones."