“The message that I got was I should be content that I wasn’t killed,” says Stewart Rand.
The Haligonian was hit by a car on the morning of September 30 while riding his bike on the Bedford Highway near Nelsons Landing Boulevard. He says he was thrown into the air by a vehicle that didn’t stop at the stop sign.
“I initially was told two days after the collision that the case would be closed because there was nothing the police could charge the driver with,” he says. “I’m very happy that I was not seriously injured, but I want to ensure that there’s enough of a deterrent in place that it will prevent people from doing it in the future.”
As of October 10, Halifax Regional Police have closed the case and issued a ticket to the car’s driver for “failing to yield to highway traffic when entering a highway,” according to HRP’s public information officer John MacLeod.
But Rand says the police initially weren’t going to issue any ticket to the driver.
“I haven’t gotten an explanation of that change of position from the police,” Rand says. “But the fact that there was any ambiguity around it that tells me that there’s a problem somewhere.”
However, by this time next year, the penalties for drivers who hit cyclists could increase by double.
The new Traffic Safety Act, which had its third reading at the Nova Scotia Legislature on October 11, identifies “vulnerable road users” as a new category of people on the streets. It replaces the current Motor Vehicle Act, which was written in the 1930s.
Section 313 of the new act says that drivers who injure or kill vulnerable road users will face a doubled monetary fine, and will lose their license for a period of time.
According to the act, vulnerable road users include pedestrians, anyone working on or adjacent to highways, emergency services and police working on or adjacent to highways, occupants of tractors, motorcycles, and bicycles.
Vulnerable road users could include occupants of “a conveyance other than a vehicle” or “a person prescribed by the regulations.”
Rand thinks this last category could make the legislation unclear and says Nova Scotians don’t know what the regulations will be when the government enacts the law.
“At this point no one can say what is going to be in the regulations until they’re released,” Rand says. “It used to say you have to yield to traffic on the road when you’re turning, but now it just says follow the regulations.”
But Paul Arsenault, director of special projects for Nova Scotia’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, says the specific regulations will allow for easier adaptation as new technologies arise.
“Things have changed so much and things are changing even more rapidly today. We moved a lot of the technical details from the act into the regulations, and that’s important because if there’s something new that comes along, like a new vehicle type, we don’t have to open the Motor Vehicle Act to deal with it,” says Arsenault.
Arsenault explains that things like driverless cars, Segways and three-wheeled motorcycles, which are hard to govern under the current act, will be defined under the new legislation.
“The Motor Vehicle Act, I think it’s fair to say, was written for motor vehicles,” says Arsenault.
“So where we sit today, with the growth in cycling and the desire to get everybody out walking, we needed to develop an act that looks at all road users and thinks about how they interact,” Arsenault says.
Several stakeholders have had input on the new legislature, and Arsenault says the government will continue to seek feedback about the new regulations before they come into effect, which won’t be for about a year.
“They can determine whether or not there might be some additional things they might want us to consider,” Arsenault adds, “This is an act for all Nova Scotians at the end of the day, and the regulations affect everyone so, we need to be mindful of everyone’s concerns.”
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This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2018.
Nice to know the police can’t do sweet-fuck-all about these things unless a motorist kills us – thanks Nova Scotia! Hopefully, the changes to the Motor Vehicle Act will allow the police to switch things up. In the meantime, I urge cyclists to simply snap a picture of the license plate of cars and with that file a complaint with the police. Take the motorists to court even if they are not charged. The motorists will have to answer to the charges. The courts will have to hear the the cases brought before them, even if the cyclist loses the case The Province will realize that cyclists are not going to fuck around anymore. And as a result, motorists will think twice before they cut us off 1.5 milliseconds in their commute home.
I wish they would post specific proposals for change and seek input rather than this wait until you see what we are going to do approach.
One comment he makes about three wheeled motorcycles being hard to govern under the current act is a red herring. There are lots of ways to govern. One important change that should be made with respect to motorcycles is put in more incentive for safety training. I am not in favour of full mandatory training, but strong encouragement for training and certainly an improved test for motorcycle licensing which currently is very poor.
I just spent about three months in Europe with several stops in Amsterdam. The city is an amazing creation of boats on waterways, trams on tracks bustling through the city centre, cars, buses, pedestrians and bicycles, lots of bicycles!!
To look at it you would compare it to an ants nest, immense traffic by our little town’s standards. On any given moment you can see a mother cycling by(no helmet, silly to them) with a child on the back rack, another across the bar, and holding a basket from the market…All are smiling, laughing. Two men doubling on one bike drive by the other way clanging their bells as they go by.
Cars do not drive slow. They generally drive faster there than they do here. But they have no worries because they have got one thing together that We have yet to figure out.
My observation was that they realized long ago that cars and bicycles don’t belong together. That only produces injury and death. And does it really matter whose at fault after it’s done. Pedestrians and bicycles have lots of shared spaces, because a bicycle never killed a pedestrian.
Here in Halifax On any given day, you can look on a lot of city streets and see literally miles and miles of isolated sidewalk, with maybe one or two pedestrians, and at the same time, a cyclist weaving about in traffic constantly taking their lives in their hands. Any moment on any given day they could be the next fatality.
Bike lanes?? The answer is not to put white paint on a road making it more narrow and even worse when a car has to cross it to park at a metre. It looks silly. One blind spot or quick mistake and again, the result is a fatal injury.
…It’s just my opinion but Amsterdam looked so much more civilized and organized with so much more traffic than we’ve ever experienced here.They have heightened barriers between street and sidewalk/bike lane. Tens of thousands of people travel them every day in safety without worry.