Quebec Road Safety Plan Article
In April, the City of Québec approved its 2025-2029 Road Safety Strategy. This roadmap, the seventh such document released since 2007, confirms a commitment to achieving the target of zero pedestrian and cyclist deaths by 2040. Meanwhile, City Council has renewed its $60 million investment in road safety, first made in support of the 2020-2024 Strategy, for an additional five years.
The 2020-2024 Strategy
The 2020-2024 Strategy addresses a pressing desire among residents to reduce the number of road traffic victims in the community. As is the case with all major projects and policies, such as the City’s tramway project, it was developed through a participatory process that included public consultations.
The process also provided an opportunity to dispel myths surrounding Vision Zero in a province where the approach is not well known and where some view it as an attempt to avoid dealing with issues of road congestion and traffic flow. Originating in Sweden in the late 1990s, Vision Zero introduced a new way of thinking about road safety. The idea of zero tolerance for unpredictable fatal collisions united people around a shared concern for protecting life.
This collective awareness guided the development of the 2020-2024 Strategy, which focused on four priority issues: speeding, the safety of elementary students, safety on arterial roads and courtesy.
As a result, the number of road traffic victims in the City of Québec decreased between 2020 and 2023, a period when the figure increased in all the province's other major cities. This accomplishment depended on several important measures taken starting in 2020.
Before 2021, 81% of municipal roads had a 50 km/h limit and 17% had a 30 km/h limit. Since 2021, the ratio has been reversed. Almost three quarters of roads (73%) now have either a 30 km/h limit (60%) or a 40 km/h limit (13%). As for those roads that still have a 50 km/h limit (25%), the vast majority are arterial or collector roads. Over the three-year period from 2022 to 2024, speed data collected on more than 18 million vehicles using mobile speed display devices showed a 3.5% increase in the number of motorists obeying the new speed limits (from 68.94% to 72.52%).
The City has 116 elementary schools within its borders. At the end of 2024, school routes had been established around the vast majority of these institutions, with plans to complete work on more complex projects by 2026. A major online survey conducted in 2019 provided insight on parental perceptions of road safety around schools. However, when it was repeated in 2024, the survey found that perceptions remained virtually unchanged despite the improvements made by the City.
An extensive study based on historical data from 35,000 collisions made it possible to prioritize corrective action at 50 accident-prone sites, all located on arterial or collector roads. However, these interventions only led to a partial reduction in new fatal collisions on the 700 km of arterial and collector roads in the municipal network.
A major communication campaign to promote courteous driving, combined with an increase in radar enforcement and more than 180 local road safety projects led by neighbourhood councils and elementary school governing boards, has prompted real change in driver behaviour over the last five years. Motorists are showing more respect and courtesy toward pedestrians.
The 2025-2029 Strategy: Two new priority issues
Between 2019 and 2023, 15 people aged 65 and over lost their lives on our roads. Whereas people in this age group accounted for three out of every five traffic deaths, they currently only make up a fifth of the overall population (their share of the population will increase to 25% by 2030).
The number of micromobility users has also increased in recent years, as new electric one-, two-, three- and four-wheeled vehicles have become available. The àVélo electric bike-sharing service has also brought many more cyclists onto the City’s roadways, bike paths and sidewalks. Together, the rise of micromobility and the success of àVélo reflect a growing and lasting interest in simple and effective alternatives to solo car use. At the same time, these trends often raise new challenges associated with sharing urban space, especially where more vulnerable road users are concerned.
Accordingly, the advisory committee1 for the new Strategy has recognized these emerging issues as priorities, while recommending that efforts continue to reduce speeding, make arterial roads safer and enhance safety around schools.
Safety of older pedestrians
As an accredited age-friendly municipality (AFM), the City of Québec had already begun implementing multiple initiatives to promote active living and to help seniors keep living at home. It was therefore well positioned to take on more responsibility for ensuring the safety of older pedestrians.
Inspired by New York City's Pedestrian Safety Action Plan for Older New Yorkers, the City of Québec will create 43 senior-friendly zones selected using a multi-criteria model of collisions involving older pedestrians, residential areas with high concentrations of seniors and destinations popular with seniors (shopping centres, commercial streets, parks, community centres, etc.).
1 Along with different categories of road users, the members of the road safety advisory committee represent seniors, persons with reduced mobility, school service centres, the provincial automobile insurance corporation (Société d’assurance automobile du Québec), the local public transit authority (Réseau de transport de la Capitale), and the provincial department of transportation (Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable).
This major project is being carried out in four stages: selecting the routes requiring intervention, developing a toolbox of measures for implementation, consulting with seniors in each zone and implementing the interventions.
The City has also set a new target of zero fatal or serious collisions in senior-friendly zones by 2035. Furthermore, it has asked the regional public health authority (Direction régionale de santé publique) to prepare an overview of outdoor falls involving older, disabled or mobility-impaired people on the municipal network, using emergency room admissions data from local hospitals.
Safety on arterial roads
The 2020 Road Safety Intervention Plan equipped the City to address already identified high-risk sites. It now aims to complete improvements to the accident-prone sites prioritized in the previous Strategy, update its Intervention Plan and adopt a more proactive approach by acquiring the expertise and technological means to forecast and continuously improve intersections and roads with a high risk of fatal collisions. For example, efforts will include a video capture and near-collision analysis pilot project.
Speed Management
A number of planned measures will build on those implemented in the context of the 2020-2024 Strategy:
∙ The adoption of a new City of Québec Street Planning Guide for use by experts responsible for road design and municipal infrastructure maintenance. The document will address the greening of public rights-of-way and sustainable stormwater management, as well as efforts to reduce speeding and implement universal accessibility concepts when opening new streets or redeveloping those in the City’s existing 2,500 km network.
∙ The ongoing installation of speed humps on streets where vehicles regularly exceed the posted limit by more than 15 km/h. ∙ Continued communication and community mobilization efforts to encourage compliance with speed limits.
∙ The increased use of automated camera enforcement on accident-prone arterial roads and around schools, made possible through the acquisition of about fifteen new fixed and mobile photo radar units.
Safety of elementary students
School service centre representatives are interested in working with the City to expand active transportation access to elementary schools where at-risk areas have been identified outside existing school routes.
A pilot project titled Drop Me Off 500 Steps from School seeks to encourage parents who drive their children to school to let them walk the last 500 steps by relocating existing drop-off zones. This provides children with a twice-daily opportunity for 10 minutes of walking while helping administrators reduce congestion and the risk of collisions around school entrances.
Based on the success it has enjoyed since 2020, the Road Safety Mobilization Program for neighbourhood councils and elementary school governing boards has been renewed for five years.
Micromobility and sharing urban space
Like other cities worldwide, Québec needs a better understanding of micromobility and the challenges associated with its use, especially in terms of sharing the road. With this in mind, the Police Service is currently drawing up a micromobility intervention plan. For example, it will begin checking to ensure that micromobility vehicles sold by local distributors comply with provincial standards.
The City also intends to continue supporting the development of micromobility as an individual or shared mode of transportation that complements the public transit network. Relevant measures will include accelerating the expansion of the àVélo bike-sharing service and adjusting municipal regulations to better govern the use of micromobility vehicles on bike paths.
Finally, the City is encouraging the provincial government to develop a comprehensive vision for micromobility while making any necessary amendments to the Highway Safety Code, in consultation with municipalities and police forces.
What will the city of tomorrow look like?
The automobile was the dominant mode of transportation from the 1950s onward. It has shaped our cities and continues to shape our lifestyles. The 1970s were marked by a growing awareness of speed-related safety issues. The decade also saw the automotive industry take an unprecedented interest in road safety and begin adding a range of new safety features to vehicles. This helped to significantly reduce the number of motorists who became road traffic victims.
Vision Zero triggered a second awakening, although this time it was transportation professionals and road users who drove change. Road safety has become a top priority for urban residents. Many municipalities and other levels of government have decided to prioritize the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, who are more vulnerable to impacts than motorists.
Even as most of them have maintained a car-dependent lifestyle, parents have grown more concerned about the safety of their children.
At the same time, urban planning concepts like friendly streets, complete streets, traffic-calmed neighbourhoods, 15-minute cities, 30 km/h cities, CittaSlow and pedestrian-oriented development (POD) have encouraged speed reductions and promised to improve the quality of urban life by reducing car dominance.
Given that sensory perception and processing speed both decline with age, the fact that the average age of the population is increasing in many countries has made senior safety a priority for urban residents and transportation professionals.
Whether these initiatives are called senior-friendly zones, school routes, 30 zones, or something else altogether (based on the underlying concepts used by urban planners), they all reflect a set of two widely shared beliefs: that we need to slow down to live safely, all while speeding up our efforts to live a richer life.
We may well be approaching a new turning point!
Hervé Chapon
City of Québec