A new study suggests that St. Albert's streets are the eighth safest in Canada when it comes to collisions.
The Allstate Insurance Company of Canada released its eighth annual Safe Driving Study Nov. 30. The study tracks collisions in 86 communities in Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario, including St. Albert, based on claims submitted by drivers insured through Allstate. Each community has at least 1,500 drivers insured through the company.
The study did not examine the severity of collisions and did not look at why cities moved up or down the ranks.
The study found that just 4.22 per cent of St. Albert drivers insured through Allstate submitted a claim for a motor vehicle collision between 2014 and 2016, making it the eighth safest community in the study. The city placed 17th last year and 40th the year before.
St. Albert is one of four Alberta communities to make the study's top 10 for road safety; the others are Spruce Grove, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. This city also had the second biggest drop in collision claims nationally with a drop of 23 per cent, second only to Leduc.
The Allstate study indicates an encouraging trend in traffic safety, but it's tough to say how representative it is of all drivers, said Scott Wilson, policy analyst with the Alberta Motor Association. Poor economic conditions may also be discouraging driving, which could explain part of this drop.
The top cause of claims in the study was being rear-ended at 26 per cent, followed by turns and intersections at 24 per cent.
St. Albert RCMP Cpl. Laurel Kading said intersections and rear-enders were definitely a problem in St. Albert, particularly when it came to drivers turning left into the far lane instead of the near one.
"They're illegal and they're dangerous," she said of these turns.
Drivers turning left must turn into the closest lane and then signal and shoulder-check before turning into the far one, Kading said.
Tips from the champ
Spruce Grove topped the charts as the safest place in Canada for the second year in a row with a collision claim rate of just 3.6 per cent.
Spruce Grove has held its number of collisions more or less constant since 2010 despite a 30 per cent growth in population, said Robert Kosterman, the city's fire chief and co-ordinator of its traffic safety efforts.
"Our collisions per capita have gone down drastically," he said, as have the severity of their collisions. Spruce Grove RCMP responded to three per cent more collisions last year than in 2010; the fire department, which only goes out to severe crashes, went out to six per cent less.
Kosterman credited his city's safer streets to a three-step cross-department collision prevention effort modelled on the principles of fire prevention.
Step one is engineering, where you use remote sensors to identify hot-spots for speeding or collisions and design the street to prevent them. This can mean changing speed limits or a complete redesign, such as the traffic circle the city recently dropped onto McLeod Ave.
Step two is education through tools such as photo enforcement for speed, red lights and stop signs. Staffers ensure that tickets get to offenders within four days so the crime is still top of mind, and sometimes provide video evidence to show drivers exactly what they did wrong.
Step three is enforcement in the form of officers pulling people over. If you still have a safety issue after all that, you circle back around to engineering and step up your efforts, Kosterman said.
Kosterman, Wilson and Kading agreed that one of the most effective steps drivers can take to stay safe on the road is to slow down.
"Five kilometres over the speed limit can be the difference between a serious collision and no collision," Kosterman said.
The study is available at allstate.ca.
