The City's Safety Improvement Program (SIP) touches on all three Es of road safety: education, enforcement and engineering, with primary focus on engineering. The program selects locations to study, carries out in-depth studies of collision patterns and recommends countermeasures. Typically, the program studies locations with higher-than-average traffic collision rates.
The program is carried out on an annual basis, when year-end traffic collision and volume data becomes available. The study takes all road users, including pedestrians and cyclists, into consideration. SIP assessments lead to recommended changes to signage, pavement markings, traffic control signal timings and phases and/or the installation of skid-resistant asphalt and roadway geometric modifications. The majority of the implemented recommendations are low-cost, high-return measures that provide operational benefits as well as improved safety.
The collection and analysis of the City's collision data is critical to the success of SIP. Police services forward copies of all collision reports to City staff, who maintain a database of relevant information. The analysis of this information is summarized in an annual Collision Statistics Report.