Cyclist, 89, hit fatally by bus
An 89-year-old cyclist was hit and killed by a bus Monday in Maisonneuve.
-
Kate
Reply
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Pages
Other levels of gov’t
Sideblog projects
Enviro Montreal is a Bluesky feed that follows local environment news. Also available on Mastodon.
Archives
Pages rescued from montreal.com
Meta
MarcG 08:49 on 2025-03-18 Permalink
It looks like they’ve got traffic set up bidirectionally on one side of the street so they probably didn’t think to look for traffic coming from there. Sad. Bigups for biking at 89.
MarcG 08:49 on 2025-03-18 Permalink
I wonder if the bus was doing 30kmh like the sign indicates.
Nicholas 12:29 on 2025-03-18 Permalink
Just looking at the photo, and the intersection on Streetview, I immediately guessed what the article would say. La Fontaine looks like a great bike route, the BRT construction has pushed traffic to one side of Pie-IX, and, well, we can’t be sure yet, but they do suggest the person biking might have gone through the red light.
We’ve had, I think, now three deaths by STM buses in the last year or so, two of people walking and one biking. I don’t know if there is a solution to this, but it’s just worth noting that the mass of a bus or truck is just so much bigger than a car, so being hit by one, even at low speed, is so much worse. I had a colleague who drove a truck for a living before the job where we worked together, and when driving around in our small vehicle he always let big trucks and buses and the like, large vehicles that are hard to manoeuvre and with huge blind spots, go ahead of him. I’m pretty assertive on foot and on bike, but I heed his advice. Like the airline industry, our goal should not be to assign blame but to figure out how we can prevent future tragedies. I hope we, one day, live in a place with no preventable deaths.
bob 02:10 on 2025-03-19 Permalink
There is no such thing as a place with no preventable deaths.
We have designed and built cities for vehicle traffic with pedestrians as an afterthought or retrofit. The way to not be killed by traffic is to avoid it, and when it is unavoidable proceed as if you were walking in a mine field – with an overabundance of caution.
Blork 11:44 on 2025-03-19 Permalink
While there is some Realpolitik logic in what Bob says, that doesn’t mean we should just shrug and give over to it. There are guidelines for safety when setting up construction zones and other hazards, and we should use them (and always be reviewing and refining them). After all, not everyone is fully loaded with an abundance of caution. Some people are old, or not-all-there (various levels of dementia, etc.). Sometimes people are distracted, or otherwise unfocused. Some people are just dumb.
In this case, Pix-IX is totally discombobulated with construction, resulting in the northbound lane being used for southbound traffic, plus there’s a confusing plethora of cones and whatnot. Along comes an 89-year-old on a bike. In a perpendicular direction comes a bus, driving in the wrong direction (on purpose, because of construction) and is probably wholly focused on that. Old guy, for whatever reason doesn’t see that he has a red light and the oncoming bus has a green (so much visual distraction!). Boom.
How do you prevent that, aside from urging everyone to be more careful? I don’t know. Ideally, bus and other drivers should be trained to be extra careful in such zones because of the risk of THE OTHER PERSON making a mistake due to the confusion and distraction. But there’s a certain level of magical thinking there. Train the driver to be more cautious in such zones, and then day after day, week after week, month after month the driver goes through that intersection with no problems. It’s easy to let the guard down.