An interest group in Winnipeg is asking the city to increase the time at which amber lights at a high-speed intersection stay on, reasoning that the seemingly short amber light window could cause road accidents.
The intersection in question is the one joining Bishop Grandin Boulevard and St. Mary’s Road. The amber lights at the intersection purportedly last for only moments and drivers are not given enough time to slow down, resulting in the motorists being ticketed for speeding.
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There is more to the intersection’s lights than just causing more drivers to get ticketed. A Manitoba Public Insurance list last year named the intersection the fifth worst in the city from 2005 to 2014, having seen 1,556 collisions within that period.
Four members of the interest group Wise Up Winnipeg held up signs Sunday on the way to the intersection, cautioning drivers about the supposedly “quick” amber lights. Group founder Todd Dube believes that the problem lies with the lights themselves, not enforcement.
“When you have an amber time that is too short, how that is reflected in the data is collisions before entering the intersection. That’s when people realize, when they see the amber, they don’t have enough time to reasonably stop or process this crisis and then try and proceed through,” Dube told
CBC News.
“The only crisis here, yearly, chronically, to put it on this list, is the poor engineering that needs to be corrected. Otherwise, you’d have to believe that for some reason, people like to gather here to crash for some reason,” he added.
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St. Vital City Councillor Brian Mayes attended the event after hearing about it in the news, saying that the city just completed a study on the intersection’s collisions.
“We’re not ignoring it. It’s an issue, and that’s why we had the first study done, and we’ll be doing more,” Mayes said.
Mayes, however, believes that increasing the times on the lights is not the solution.
“I don’t think the problem is ... we need a longer light at certain intersections. I think that would just confuse people,” he explained. “I do think it’s a fair point to say we need more advanced notice of the lights changing. I think that’s a fair point, and that’s something some of us have raised.”
A spokesperson for the City of Winnipeg told
CBC News that the four-second time is suitable for the intersection.
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