A Langford business owner says minor crashes and near-misses are a common occurrence at that intersection where a collision between a cyclist and driver of a truck took place on Friday.
Kevin Strelaeff, owner of Ink FX Tattoo and Piercing, says on Friday, June 7, he looked out at the street in front of his business on the corner of Peatt Road and Goldstream Avenue in Langford and noticed a number of police and fire trucks out front.
“Then we noticed someone laying in in the crosswalk, so I figured maybe a pedestrian got struck,” Strelaeff told CHEK News in a Zoom interview.
“I mentioned to the piercer ‘I wonder if we caught that on video.’ And so she went back and checked and then showed me the video after the fact that I was like ‘holy smokes, someone got hit pretty good.'”
West Shore RCMP says a truck was making a right turn from Goldstream onto Peatt in Langford and turned into the path of a cyclist, who then hit the vehicle.
“The driver of the truck was making a right turn at the intersection when the E-Bike travelling straight through in the bicycle lane collided with the truck at approximately 30km/h,” RCMP said in a news release.
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Along that stretch of road, Goldstream Avenue has bike lanes and ICBC says drivers must yield to cyclists when turning across a bike lane.
BC Emergency Health Services says paramedics assessed the patient on scene but did not transport anyone to hospital.
Stephen Hall, director of environmental health and safety with AFL, confirmed one of the company’s drivers was the driver of the truck in the incident, and the company is conducting an investigation into the incident.
“At AFL safety is definitely a core value and I’d say it’s the one most talked about across the organization,” Hall said.
“Any time we have an employee go behind the wheel we have driver abstract requirements that’s very strict; we do a full day of Smith driver training, which is the top driver training in the industry; we utilize GPS units in every vehicle, we have notifications set up so say if somebody was going 10 over the speed limit, their supervisor would get a notification, if somebody is breaking hard, somebody has been aggressive, they get notifications and every one of those notifications is followed up.”
Hall says this incident highlights that there are an increasing number of e-bikes on the road, and that more awareness is needed, but he would also like to see more restrictions on the bikes.
“When you start looking at provincial restrictions, and that includes some administrative controls like possibly licensing, possibly awareness training for e-bike drivers, that they are sharing roads with drivers, and if you are travelling at that rate of speed,” Hall said.
“They need to understand that you’re sharing the road with vehicles and pedestrians, so controls just help with awareness for everybody in training, same as you do for driver’s license.”
When asked about the requirement for drivers to yield to cyclists when turning across bike lanes, Hall said it’s too early to comment on that as the incident is still under investigation.
Hall says once the investigation is complete, if there are lessons to be learned from it, then the information will be shared with its operators across Canada.
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West Shore RCMP says the driver of the white truck was make a right hand turn onto Peatt Road, which crosses the bike lane shown on the right of the picture. (Google Street View)
91 crashes in 5 years: ICBC
ICBC’s crash stats show there has been 91 crashes between 2018 and 2022 at this intersection, however, Strelaeff says that doesn’t paint the full picture.
“We hear people honking their horn out there almost constantly. It’s probably every three or four times the light changes there’s gonna be someone honking their horn at someone, and there’s lots of close calls,” Strelaeff said.
“There are a lot of people doing a left hand turn, and then someone trying to beat the yellow, and there ends up being a minor accident. We’ve got a few of those on camera and we’ve assisted the RCMP with those and giving them some footage. But yeah, there’s lots and there’s definitely issues with pedestrians, and it’s quite a dangerous intersection there.”
Strelaeff says he isn’t sure why this intersection seems to cause so many issues, since there aren’t any blind corners and he thinks the visibility is good.
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Laura Brougham
