A Traffic Safety meeting arranged by Ward 6 Councillor Sam Trosow occurred on the evening of July 23, 2025 at the parish hall of the St John Evangelist Church in the old north community of London, Ontario. The hall was fully occupied by the time the meeting got under way. Guest speakers at the meeting included Staff Sergeant Michel Anderson of the London City Police Service, Doug MacRae, Director of Transportation for the City of London, Dr. Colin Evans, Trauma Team Leader, of the London Health Sciences Centre Emergency Department, and Zygmunt Gorski, a road safety and collision reconstruction consultant in the London area. Each speaker was given a short opportunity to present their opening remarks before the floor was put to comments and questions from local residents.
With respect to my input I focused my preliminary comments on my background as few persons in the room knew who I was. There was a purposeful reason why I mentioned that, in school I was introduced to the research of Sigmund Freud. (This was not a topic that most wanted to hear.)
In grade school the system decided to change my name to “Sigmond”, where I had no choice in that decision. I went through school recognizing that I had a strange name that no one else had. But then I came across the name “Sigmund Freud” and it caught my curiosity simply because he was the only one I found who shared my name. I told the audience that I went to London’s Central library and discovered 80 manuals describing his research, and so I started reading about psychoanalysis.
Very few in the room likely wanted to hear these “off topic”, personal comments. And one person stood up and actually said “move on”. But there was a reason for my comments as I will explain.
A large part of the road safety issue is actually an assessment of human behavior. And psychiatrists and psychologists are the scientists who study that behavior. What I learned from Freud and psychoanalysis is that humans behave in complex ways. Their motivations and triggers are often unknown, even to themselves. And the opinions that persons express about road safety are filled with those unrecognized motivations and triggers. Like in so many other aspects of life, persons develop emotional attachments to their beliefs. Yet those emotional attachments are often what prevent an unbiased recognition of road safety problems and the corrections needed to fix them.
The other “off topic” point I tried to make is that during my psychology training I was exposed to the complexities and pitfalls of scientifically studying human behavior. I was introduced to studies of researchers who attempted to elicit some credible response from their subjects and how the methodology needed to be well thought out. Biases are created when something in the experiment causes the subject to provide a response due to something unintentionally brought into the process that fouled up the result. So as a result of my psychology training I was acutely aware that one must be careful about conclusions drawn from human responses to various scenarios. Again, this portion of my discussion was not appreciated by most of the audience.
The purpose of conducting scientific experiments is to cause the response of someone, or something, and that response is not predetermined by the experimenter. Indeed an unbiased experimenter does not decide, a priory, what the result will be. Instead the experimenter reviews the results, confirms that they have been obtained in an unbiased manner, and then concludes something from those results. This is the methodology of legitimate science. Unfortunately such rigorous attention to avoid bias is not the focus of most persons attending community meetings.
So as I continued through my presentation I mentioned several times that objective data is needed to understand whether a road safety problem exists in Old North. It was also necessary to obtain some information about the characteristics of such a problem.
In the previous discussions by Sergeant Anderson and Doug MacRae I felt there was a lack of transfer of objective data to the audience. And the residents did not press them for such data.
One comment made by Sergeant Anderson is that his team set up an observational device, just a short time prior to the Safety Meeting, he called an “armadillo” which was described as a video camera mounted on a long pole. No photo was shown to demonstrate what this device looked like. This was set-up at the intersection of Colborne and St James for period of about 11 days. Returned data included observations of over 40,000 vehicles and an average speed was reported somewhere in the range of 44 km/h. Although this could be useful data details about it were missing. And nothing written was prepared for residents to examine. Many questions about this report should have evolved but they did not.
From my viewpoint, an important question should have arisen about the results obtained in my video Session #2 of September 30, 2022. In that session I documented a number of “Unusual Actions” of drivers at the Colborne and St James intersection and the table below is presented again from my previous article.
The information that should have been obtained from Sergeant Anderson is whether the 11 days of observations at the same site demonstrated similar confusions by drivers. The above data was obtained in only 2 hours of observations which is much shorter than the 11 days of police documentations. So what did the police observe and was it similar to the results in the above table?
I had previously noted that I also conducted a follow-up video session on July 11, 2025 where I documented essentially no unusual behaviours and the traffic volume was low along both Colborne and St James. My comment was that one has to be careful about selecting documentations that could reflect potential safety problems since a lazy day in July does not reflect what conditions exist on a busy day like September 30th. So did Sergeant Anderson believe that the data he collected properly reflected the safety problems that might exist at the intersection? Unfortunately that important question was not asked.
If I heard the numbers correctly and over 40,000 vehicles were documented in 11 days, then on an average day there would have been just over 3600 vehicle observations. Yet the traffic volume data provided by the City indicates that 4,500 vehicles travel on Colborne Street per day north of St James and that value increases to 6,500 per day south of St James. So the 3600 vehicles registered in the police documentations would appear to be lower than the typical traffic volume. So does this suggest that the police data was obtained when traffic volumes were unusually low, and therefore traffic conflicts would be less likely to reveal themselves? Unfortunately this question was not posed to Sergeant Anderson.
At least one resident had questions about the video system described by Sergeant Anderson and whether it could be installed in the Old North community to document traffic. Such an approach would be very useful if the details of how the results were obtained were accompanied by the results and provided to residents for their consideration. I did not hear a firm commitment from the Sergeant about this possibility.
Doug MacRae promised that City staff were examining the Old North neighbourhood and some new programs were in the works. But no details were provided and there was nothing given in a written form for residents to consider.
Dr. Colin Evans also provided his views on how the community should approach safety issues in their neighbourhood. I was gratified to hear him mention the issue of active transportation, including cycling, as these are important matters that require a change in our transportation habits. Colin’s experience with the injuries that persons present a the City’s hospitals emphasized that safety habits such as helmets for cyclists may not prevent all injuries but they lessen their severity. This has also been my experience, not only in cycling, but in traffic safety at large.
An important point is that collision data possessed by the City of London and its police force is incomplete. There is good information about fatal collisions and those involving serious injuries, but that information is not shared with the public and therefore of limited help. There is less information about injuries and collisions as we move into lower levels of severity, yet the numbers of these lower-severity incidents are far greater than those of serious injury and fatality. Colin made an important point that he is interested in those “near miss” incidents that never make it to the official accounts. Those non-reported incidents can provide further information about the relative transportation safety of persons in the Old North neighbourhood. Colin has a different perspective because his emergency departments capture those incidents where injuries occur that are not officially reported. Public disclosure of such data would help to provide a better understanding of what is happening in the community. Yet this emergency department data is not well linked with the collision data that identifies important parameters such as collision severity and what factors caused or increased the severity of injury.
For a number of years Transport Canada provided the funding for “multi-disciplinary accident research teams” that conducted detailed studies of these relationships. Such a team was stationed at Western University and I worked there between 1980 and 1990. My regular duties involved detailed examinations of collision-involved vehicles whereby measurements and photographs were taken of evidence such as the magnitude and location of vehicle crush and the points within a vehicle interior where occupants made contact. We obtained medical data from the treating hospitals and then we would match the injuries to the occupant contacts found within or outside the vehicle. An important point is that the collision severity was also estimated through objective, collision-reconstruction procedures, taking into account momentum, energy dissipation and the details of physical evidence interpretation. It is this type of evidence that could be linked to the medical data collected at hospital emergency departments.
At the Old North Safety Meeting personal experiences were expressed by a number of residents and these demonstrated some potential safety problems. Unfortunately the experience of single individuals cannot provide a clear picture of the magnitude of a problem in the general neighbourhood. So again, it is important, from my viewpoint, that objective data be obtained from the neighbourhood and shared with residents.
Other residents were present who had professional credentials in transportation, urban planning and research methods. These persons provided some valuable comments. It would be beneficial if these persons kept an interest in the developments in Old North as their input could steer the community in the proper direction.
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