Facts of pedestrian death in bus collision should be public: advocate

An advocate for pedestrian safety says the facts of how a person died after being struck by a bus in Halifax should become public so that potential safety lessons are learned.

Norm Collins, the president and founder of the Crosswalk Safety Society of Nova Scotia, says understanding what occurred Saturday evening at the busy, main terminal in Dartmouth, N.S., may be important in designing ways to avoid similar incidents.

Halifax police declined to provide any further details on Sunday about the incident at the main Metro Transit terminal in Dartmouth, saying they’re continuing to investigate the collision that resulted in the death of a 67-year-old man.

Police have said they responded to the incident on Nantucket Avenue just after 7:30 p.m., describing it as a case of a man dying “after contact was made” with a Metro Transit bus “that was in motion.”

Mark Gough, a spokesman for the City of Halifax, said in an email on Sunday the municipality had no further comment on the incident because it’s under investigation.

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There have been several other incidents of buses striking pedestrians in the past year in Halifax, including an Aug. 25 case in which a bus hit a pedestrian in the city’s downtown during evening traffic.

Police said the man was taken to hospital with injuries in that incident.

Another collision on Jan. 10 saw a 31-year-old woman taken to hospital after being struct by the mirror of a Metro Transit bus.

In November 2018, a 52-year-old woman was struck by a bus in Dartmouth while on a marked crosswalk and suffered serious injuries.

Collins said it’s difficult to make informed comment on the death at the Dartmouth bus terminal until the facts are provided by police and the city.

But he said information should be provided in bus-pedestrian collisions to determine if lessons can be learned.

“If there is something inherently dangerous about the set-up of the bus terminal, someone should be looking at that and making changes to it,” he said.

Collins group has collected statistics from the municipal police indicating that of 87 vehicle collisions with pedestrians so far this year, 78 _ or about 90 per cent _ have resulted in injuries.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 30, 2022.