As Projet Montréal plans to introduce a motion at Monday’s council meeting calling for mandatory side guards on trucks, it has the support of a bereaved parent who has been campaigning tirelessly better truck safety since her daughter’s death more than 11 years ago.
Twenty-one-year-old Jessica Holman-Price was killed on Dec. 18, 2005, when she was struck by a snow-removal truck at Strathcona Ave. and Sherbrooke St. in Westmount. Jessica and her brother Peter-Luc, 10, were in the truck’s blind spot. She managed to push her brother to safety — for this she was honoured posthumously with the Governor General’s Award for bravery — but he sustained a brain injury that has had enduring effects.
Their mother, Jeannette Holman-Price, has made it her mission to lobby for legislation requiring all heavy trucks operating in Canada be equipped with side guards — metal bars or panels mounted on the flanks of the vehicles to prevent pedestrians and cyclists from slipping into the gap between the front and back wheels in a collision and being crushed. She has called it the “one-per-cent solution,” saying the cost of installing side guards, which ranges from $1,000 to $4,000, amounts to roughly one per cent of the cost of a vehicle.
Side guards are mandatory in much of Europe and Britain and, although there are no federal laws requiring them in Canada or the United States, bylaws requiring them have been passed in a few cities. They have been installed on trucks in fleets operated by the city of Montreal and municipalities including, Westmount and St-Laurent. But private contractors and sub-contractors are not obliged to equip their vehicles with side guards.
Opposition party Projet Montréal will ask the city of Montreal insist all trucks, including those used by private contractors, be equipped with side guards as a condition of landing a snow-clearing contract, party chief Valérie Plante said Sunday.
“This is something the city can do,” Plant said at a press conference, accompanied by Holman-Price. “We are saying that if you want to apply Vision Zero, this is a concrete example of what needs to be done to make the streets safer.” Adopted first in Sweden 20 years ago, Vision Zero is a road traffic-safety project with a long-term goal of zero traffic fatalities or serious injuries.
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Holman-Price said she plans to attend council meeting Monday to ask Mayor Denis Coderre whether he is willing to apply the “one-per-cent solution,” and spend the nominal amount per truck required to make Montrealers and tourists visiting the city safer. “No one should die under the wheels of a truck because it does not have side guards,” she said.
Only last month, on the day of the 11th anniversary of Jessica’s death, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce resident Dereck Husband was killed by a snow-clearing truck turning left onto Girouard Ave. from Sherbrooke St.
In 2010, Luc Balouin of the Quebec coroner’s office recommended Montreal require contractors to equip heavy trucks with such safety features as side guards and convex mirrors. When St-Laurent equipped its heavy-equipment trucks with side guards in 2012, Holman-Price said: “If this had been in place in 2005, my daughter would be alive.”
