This matters. People are dying and being seriously injured on Edmonton streets. The trend is getting worse. The City needs to act.
Please email your councillor or sign up to speak at Urban Planning Committee (view the agenda and documents). Tell them this funding is needed, but it must come with clear accountability, better data, stronger design standards, and real protection for people walking, rolling, biking, taking transit, and driving.
Edmonton is preparing its next Safe Mobility Strategy. The direction is mostly right. The City knows where the largest danger is: the High Injury Network shows that arterial roads are the highest-risk places in Edmonton. These are the roads where people are most often hurt or killed. These are also the roads where people walking, rolling, biking, and taking transit often face the hardest crossings and the most dangerous turns.
So yes, we support serious investment in road safety.
But safety funding cannot be a blank cheque.
Fatalities and serious injuries are rising much faster than traffic volumes. Based on the City’s own data, average daily traffic volumes at monitored sites rose from about 13.0K in 2019 to 14.8K in 2025. That is about a 14% increase. Over the same period, reported fatalities and serious injuries rose from 282 to 433. That is about a 54% increase.
This is not just “more traffic means more crashes.” This is a story of failure.
Edmonton needs safe mobility funding, but the city needs to demonstrate they know how to spend that money effectively.
If Edmonton is going to spend tens of millions of dollars on Safe Mobility projects, the City must show that those projects are actually expected to reduce death and serious injury. The data should be public. The assumptions should be clear. The designs should be reviewed before they are built. And the results should be reported after construction.
Throwing money at a problem that Administration has not shown it fully understands is not a winning strategy.
The motto needs to be simple:
Do it right the first time, every time.
TL;DR:
Public engagement matters. Lived experience matters. Accessibility needs matter. Women’s safety matters. Transit users matter. People walking, rolling, and biking matter. Drivers matter too.
But basic safety should not be up for a vote.
A public engagement process should help the City understand how people use a street, where they feel unsafe, where crossings fail, where snow piles block sightlines, where bus stops are hard to reach, and where design choices create conflict.
But public feedback should not be allowed to override safety.
No amount of public opposition should preserve a dangerous slip lane. No angry email should justify a long unsafe crossing. No request for faster traffic should defeat Vision Zero. No demand for convenience should outweigh death or serious injury.
The first goal must be safety. Every time. No compromises. That's the Vision Zero way.
After safety is met, the second goal should be moving the maximum number of people through the space using the best available mix of modes. That does not mean moving the maximum number of cars. In cities, the best use of limited space is often walking, rolling, biking, transit, and micromobility.
Moving cars is not the same as moving people.
The City is proposing major investment in arterial and intersection safety. A large part of that work appears to focus on left-turn improvements.
We support improving dangerous left turns. Left turns are a real safety problem. A driver turning left across traffic can create serious conflict with people walking, rolling, biking, and driving.
But we need better data before millions of dollars are spent.
Protected left-turn signals may help in some places. But they are not always the best answer. They can be expensive. They can preserve large, dangerous intersections. They can still fail when drivers run red lights, turn illegally, speed, or fail to yield.
A protected left-turn phase is not the same as removing the conflict.
A person walking or biking may believe they are safe to proceed because the signal says they are protected. But if a driver ignores the signal or makes an illegal turn, that person is still exposed.
That is not Vision Zero thinking.
Vision Zero should start with this question: Can we remove the conflict?
Only after that should the City ask how to manage it.
For left turns, the hierarchy should be:
If removing risk is acceptable when the City bans cycling on sidewalks, then removing risk must also be acceptable when cars are creating the danger.
The City should provide intersection-level data showing fatalities, serious injuries, total injuries, and crashes by intersection type, including:
If protected left turns are worth the investment, the data should show that intersections with protected lefts are already safer, or that adding protection produces a clear safety improvement.
If the data does not show that, Council should ask why that money is not being used to remove the conflict instead.
The current package appears to focus heavily on traffic signals, left turns, and arterial intersections. Those are important. But they are not enough.
We are disappointed that there does not appear to be enough focus on bike lanes, shared-use paths, multi-use paths, or what are often really just wide sidewalks.
Edmonton has spent a lot of money building wide sidewalks through programs like Active Transportation Network Expansion (ATNE) and the Building Great Neighbourhoods (BGN). These routes may look better on a map, but many of them fail exactly where safety matters most: at intersections.
A wide sidewalk without safe intersection treatments is not an all-ages-and-abilities bike route. It is a sidewalk with better branding.
The City’s own Safe Mobility work has highlighted that sidewalk riding is especially unsafe at intersections. That concern was used to support Edmonton’s sidewalk cycling ban. We disagree with that ban, and we have written about why it is misguided: The Case for Sidewalk Cycling: Why Edmonton’s Ban Is Misguided
But if the City believes sidewalk riding is dangerous because of intersections, then the answer cannot be to build more wide sidewalks without fixing the intersections.
This is a chance to fix the routes already built.
Every ATNE and BGN route that uses a wide sidewalk or shared path should be reviewed for intersection safety. That includes crossings at arterials, slip lanes, driveways, high-speed turns, transit stops, and places where drivers are looking for other cars instead of people walking, rolling, or biking. The BGN team has done a better job of this. Projects like 132 Ave prove that the city knows the assignment and has the capability to execute.
We have also written about why not all multi-use paths are created equal: Why Not All Multi-Use Paths Are Created Equal. A good path needs safe crossings. Without them, the route is incomplete.
Slip lanes are a serious problem.
They are designed to help drivers turn faster. That is the opposite of what should happen where people are walking, rolling, biking, or accessing transit.
Slip lanes are especially dangerous because drivers often look left for a gap in vehicle traffic while turning right. But the people they may hit are often coming from the right.
That is a design failure.
This risk is even worse where slip lanes cross bike lanes, shared paths, wide sidewalks, or high-volume pedestrian routes.
A person outside a car should not have to guess whether a driver has looked in the right direction. The design should slow the driver down, make the crossing clear, and remove the conflict where possible.
The City should identify all slip lanes on the High Injury Network, all slip lanes that cross bike routes or shared paths, and all slip lanes near transit stops, schools, seniors’ housing, hospitals, and major destinations.
Then it should remove them.
The City uses the term “safe crossing.” But a crossing is not safe just because it has paint, signs, flashing lights, or a push button.
A safe crossing must work for a child, a senior, a disabled person, a person using a mobility aid, a person walking at night, a person crossing in winter, and a person biking or rolling legally through a route the City told them to use.
A safe crossing must also account for predictable human behaviour. People take direct routes. People avoid long waits. People cross where the place they need to go is directly across the street. People do not always understand why one side of an intersection has a crossing and another side does not.
That is not “bad behaviour.” That is normal behaviour.
On Jan. 21, 2026, a 78-year-old woman was struck by a westbound driver near 115 Street and 107 Avenue. EPS reported that she was crossing near the intersection on a part of 107 Avenue where crossing is prohibited. She later died in hospital. EPS also said speed and alcohol were not believed to be factors.
This is exactly why design matters.
At this location, the City appears to have provided a signalized crossing on one side of the avenue while prohibiting crossing on the other side. There are crossings nearby, but the design still leaves a predictable desire line untreated. From a Vision Zero lens, that is the problem.
If a person can reasonably be expected to cross there, the design must either make that crossing safe or make the unsafe crossing physically impossible while providing a safe and direct alternative.
A sign is not enough. That's not Vision Zero thinking. Examples like this are why we do not trust the City to spend this money well.
This is especially troubling when a location has already received a safety treatment. If a “safe crossing” still leaves a predictable crossing movement unsafe, then the program needs to improve. This does not mean the City should stop building safer crossings. It means the City must stop assuming the current standard is good enough. We have written at length about why the current Complete Streets Standards are insufficient.
Safe crossings should include the right tools for the location, such as raised crossings, raised tables, curb extensions, daylighting, median refuges, leading pedestrian intervals, accessible pedestrian signals, protected intersections, no-right-on-red, tighter turning radii, and removal of slip lanes.
A crossing that depends on people ignoring their desire line, waiting a long time, taking a less direct route, or perfectly understanding inconsistent crossing rules is not safe enough.
Do it right the first time, every time.
Design matters most. But enforcement also matters.
Removing photo radar has made a bad situation worse. The City’s data shows traffic deaths and serious injuries rising alongside restrictions on automated enforcement. Red-light violations are also a major concern.
But this is not only about recent provincial changes.
Edmonton has had decades of weak traffic enforcement. Drivers have learned that many traffic laws are optional. Speeding is common. Rolling through right turns is common. Blocking crossings is common. Parking in bike lanes is common. Failing to yield is common.
That culture did not happen by accident.
If laws are not enforced, people learn not to follow them.
Edmonton needs stronger traffic enforcement, stronger parking enforcement, right-sized fines, tow-away rules for blocked bike lanes and crossings, and real consequences for dangerous driver behaviour.
This is not about punishment for its own sake. It is about public safety.
Drivers also benefit when the rules are clear and consistently enforced. A city where people run red lights, speed through school zones, block crossings, and turn illegally is not safe for anyone.
The police need to own this. Bylaw Enforcement needs to be better. Peace officers must step up.
The City’s own traffic safety research shows strong concern about risky driving. Many residents support traffic calming, stronger enforcement, and better safety measures. People know Edmonton’s streets are not safe enough.
This is the moment to act.
If Council wants to fund Safe Mobility, it should fund it properly. But it should also require proof that the work will be done well, and ensure there are accountability measures to hold the people that design and build our infrastructure and enforce our laws to the right standards. We've spent 10 years failing to make progress on Vision Zero, we cannot continue to throw good money after bad just for the sake of virtue signalling.
Council should not accept broad claims that projects will improve safety. It should ask for clear, public, disaggregated data.
At minimum, Council should ask Administration to report fatal and serious injury data in three time periods:
The data should be shown at the intersection level where possible.
It should include deaths, serious injuries, all injuries, and total crashes. It should be disaggregated by mode, movement, conflict type, and street design.
Council should ask for specific data on:
Council should also ask for a list of every location where a fatal or serious injury happened after a City safety project, renewal project, bike project, crossing project, or arterial project was built.
That is how we learn.
That is how we stop rebuilding danger into the street.
Edmonton needs Safe Mobility funding.
But Edmonton also needs to prove the money will be spent on projects that actually reduce death and serious injury.
We support improving arterial left turns. We support safer intersections. We support better signals where they are the right tool. We support leading pedestrian intervals, accessible pedestrian signals, enforcement, school safety, traffic calming, and safer crossings.
But we also need conflict removal. We need slip lane removals. We need no-right-on-red where people are exposed. We need safe bike and path crossings. We need real Complete Streets standards. We need data that shows whether expensive treatments are worth the cost.
Most of all, we need a City that treats Vision Zero as a binding safety duty, not a slogan.
Do it right the first time, every time.
No more unsafe crossings with safe-sounding names.
No more wide sidewalks without safe intersections.
No more expensive fixes without clear data.
No more rebuilding danger into Edmonton’s streets.