Ottawa Motorcycle Safety Strategy

In this webinar, we will explore Ottawa’s Motorcycle Safety Strategy, prepared to enhance motorcycle safety as part of their 2020-2024 Road Safety Action Plan. Based on a review of collisions between 2017 and 2021, motorcycle riders were involved in 12% of fatal collisions despite representing a significantly smaller proportion of road users. In addition, the number of motorcycle collisions experienced a 32% increase compared to the previous iteration of the RSAP (2012 to 2016). These findings emphasized the need for a focused and actionable strategy to mitigate safety risks for motorcycle riders on Ottawa’s roads.

We will discuss the identification of safety issues, proposed countermeasures, and the Strategy’s integrated approach (3 E’s – engineering, education, and enforcement) to enhance safety for motorcycle riders on Ottawa’s roads. Engineering-based countermeasures were related to maintaining good road surface conditions, providing warning signage, and addressing obstructed sightlines and run-off-the-road collisions. Potential content and topics were provided to inform the City’s motorcycle training course curriculum and sample messaging related to sharing the road with motorcycle riders. While resources for targeted motorcycle enforcement are limited, a list of enforcement topics was provided; in addition, feedback from the Ottawa Police Service was collected to inform engineering and education-based countermeasures.

The webinar will provide a summary of the key study findings and recommendations to support decisions on road safety initiatives for the City of Ottawa.

CARSP webinars are free for CARSP members.  Webinar recordings are posted 1-2 days after the live webinar takes place.  They are immediately available to CARSP members, and after one month, to the general public.  Not a CARSP member, membership is affordable ($125/year).  Join here.

Speaker

Stefan Tsang

Stefan is a Transportation Safety Engineer at True North Safety Group and is licensed as a Professional Engineer in Ontario. Stefan has over six years of experience in this role, specializing in road user safety and traffic operations. Stefan has experience in conducting in-service safety reviews, road safety audits, and operational performance reviews of intersections and corridors in various operating environments across Ontario. These studies consist of data collection, review of historic collision data, predictive safety analysis, field investigations, issues diagnosis, and countermeasure selection/evaluation to improve safety performance for all road users.