Eighteen Grade 5 students from Eagle Heights Public School in London’s Oxford Park neighbourhood have a message for those who surpass the 50-kilometre speed limit in the residential neighbourhood near their school.
“Slow down!” they shouted, during Monday morning’s launch of a new citywide lawn sign campaign.
The bright blue and yellow signs, which appeared along Foster Avenue for the first time Monday, bear a simple message: “Respect The Limit.”
“There seems to be a lot of traffic in the area, and it’s coming off Oxford, and we’re getting a lot of traffic off Wharncliffe and Riverside, they’re all very busy streets,” said Sylvia Mioduszewska, a member of the Oxford Park Community Association.
“You see a lot more cars coming through our neighbourhood, and a lot of them are in a hurry.”
The city says on average, one-third of drivers speed through residential neighbourhoods in London. The lawn sign campaign is part of an effort to get drivers to ease off the gas, in neighbourhoods all throughout the city.
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“There’s no such thing as an accident, all crashes are preventable. It’s just a matter of ensuring that we apply the proper engineer principles, we enforce the laws we have, and we educate the public on how they should be driving,” said London’s director of roads and transportation, Edward Soldo.
The signs are free, and Soldo says anyone with a concern about speeding in the neighbourhood can pick one up. There are more than 10 community centres across the city, where they’re being distributed.
Vision Zero is the name of London’s road safety strategy. Soldo says last year, they implemented red light cameras through the strategy in 2017, and there’ll be a number of other education initiatives rolling out throughout the year.
However, Ben Cowie, owner of the London Bicycle Cafe, argues the original premise of the Vision Zero idea is not to put the responsibility on people who are using the road.
He says the idea behind Vision Zero is that “the city government is responsible for designing fail-safe streets, acknowledging that humans make mistakes, and that we all have freedom of mobility.”
Cowie says a campaign telling people to slow down puts the onus on the user of the road, when the premise of Vision Zero is that the onus should be on the designer instead.
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