City staff awaiting police findings before making changes to intersection where crossing guard was killed

Three weeks after a 52-year-old crossing guard was killed after being hit by a dump truck on the intersection of Mohawk Road E. and Upper Wentworth Street, city staff say they are waiting for police to finish their investigation in order to review the intersection.

The man, who worked for the City of Hamilton, was was hit and killed around 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 13.

Ward 7 councillor Esther Pauls said at the time she was working with staff to come up with ways to make the intersection safer “as soon as possible.”

The intersection, north of the Lincoln Alexander Parkway, is in a busy area in the vicinity of Lime Ridge Mall.

Mike Field, acting director of transportation for the city, told CBC Hamilton this past week no immediate actions have been taken yet to improve safety in the area because police have yet to finish their investigation. He said new measures would be “hard to review” without knowing the circumstances surrounding the incident.

“We want to look at what we can do to enhance safety on a per location basis, but we require them to finish their investigation first,” he said.

Immediately following the incident, police told CBC Hamilton charges were expected.

On Thursday, Hamilton police spokesperson Jackie Penman said the investigation is still ongoing.

Pauls told CBC Hamilton also on Thursday she had previously requested a road safety audit of the area following “numerous concerns from citizens.”

The intersection was already undergoing construction at the time of the incident. That work would implement a number of safety measures from the audit.

“We await [police investigation] findings to see if there are any additional enhancements from an infrastructure perspective that we might possibly implement in that area,” said Pauls.

More turn restrictions across the city an option

Nick Holsey, a resident who spoke with CBC Hamilton the day after the crossing guard was killed, said the intersection had been "quite dangerous" for a few weeks as construction was underway.

"We'd have to walk out into the road, into the lanes to get around all like the pylons and stuff like that," he said Nov. 14.

Field, with the city, said that more turn restrictions, such as no-right-turn-on-reds, and interaction accommodations, such as advanced lights for cyclists and pedestrians, are some of the options his department is looking at to reduce fatal collisions, as suggested in a staff report to council.

“That report was speaking about how we're going to implement these things more broadly across the city and in a more advanced schedule than we have in the past, because those measures help protect pedestrians,” he said.

Field said the department uses collision data to determine where systemic issues and other priorities are. According to him, fatal collisions in the city have remained around the same — 14 to 15 — in past years.

“Obviously, our objective is to have nobody on the city streets injured or killed and we're, we're far from that,” he said.

However, when taking into account things like the increasing population of the city, the number is a good indicator, said Field.