Leftover road markings may have led driver astray in Westboro bus crash, expert says
Road vehicle safety expert testified Thursday at ongoing coroner's inquest
The OC Transpo bus driver who smashed into a canopy at Westboro station in January 2019, leaving three people dead, may have been led astray by road markings that had been improperly left over by a contractor hired by the City of Ottawa, an expert in road vehicle safety says.
"I think it's clear they have the potential to mislead," Ian Knight testified on Thursday.
A lower speed approach may have given the driver slightly more reaction time, but the crash's impact would have still been severe, Knight added.
Knight's testimony came on Day 12 of a coroner's inquest into the collision.
On Jan. 11, 2019, a packed OC Transpo double-decker driven by Aissatou Diallo slammed into a Transitway bus shelter at Westboro station. Three people — Judy Booth, Bruce Thomlinson and Anja Van Beek — died in the crash and many others were injured.
While the city accepted civil responsibility for the crash, Diallo was charged with 38 counts of dangerous driving causing death or bodily harm. She was acquitted of all charges in a judge-only trial in 2021.
At the trial, Diallo's defence team argued that temporary orange road markings leading to the station were confusing and played a hand in what happened.
The lines had been painted in the summer of 2018 to redirect traffic during lane closures. But by the time of the crash, they had become visible again because replacement black paint had worn off.
No city employees had complained about them, and several drivers rode the same route without issue, the inquest has heard.
A witness who works for the city testified earlier in the inquest that the construction contractor — who has gone unnamed — was supposed to have mechanically removed the orange lines at the end of the construction period in late 2018, using a method such as sandblasting or asphalt grinding.
That did not happen, in what the witness called a "construction deficiency" by the contractor, and the lines were not flagged as an issue until after the Westboro crash.
'Misleading the driver'
Knight, the road vehicle safety expert testifying Friday, reviewed evidence into the Westboro collision, including investigation reports and camera footage of the incident.
He said the positioning of the leftover markings left only a narrow space between them and the Transitway's rock wall. The ditch also had snow and ice on it.
"You can see how it looks like a marking that would guide you to steer to the right," Knight said. "So I can definitely see the possibility of that having contributed to misleading the driver."
Later, Knight said there was a "very strong possibility" the legacy markings led to the bus's "excessive" movement to the right.
Diallo herself has not testified at the inquest, though she has been called to.
Knight noted several potential countermeasures in the Westboro crash. They were ranked from 0 to 3, with 2 being "probably effective" and 3 referring to "definitely effective" measures.
Eliminating the road markings was assigned a 2. It was the only one of Knight's countermeasures related to the collision to receive a rating that high.
None of the other options, which included reducing the speed level for vehicles approaching the Transitway station and compliance with the posted 50 km/hr speed limit, received a 3.
The speed factor
When Diallo left the Transitway about 69 metres from the shelter, she was travelling between 58 km/hr and 60 km/hr, according to a narrative of the day filed early in the inquest.
In the grand scheme of things, speed might have played a role in the probability of the collision but had a greater impact in the severity of the crash, Knight testified.
One of the lawyers leading the inquest, Alessandra Hollands, asked Knight if a bus speed in line with the limit would have affected the chances of the crash happening.
Knight noted that, as shown in a detailed breakdown of speeds that day, Diallo was driving between 61 km/hr and 67 km/hr when she passed the speed limit sign. That was four seconds before she left the Transitway.
If she'd been driving 50 km/hr, that lower speed may have given her another 0.8 seconds to one second more reaction time, Knight said.
"When you're travelling fast, events happen much faster. You have less time to think about them, you have less time to look and understand what's going on around you," he said.
"There is some chance that, afforded that extra time, the driver may have recognized better the situation and may therefore not have driven to the side."
Knight calculated that if the bus had left the roadway at 50 km/hr, it would have hit the canopy at 26 km/hr.
But even so, "it certainly would still have been a very serious impact," he said.
The 'big catch' with dumping double-deckers
Among the other Westboro-specific countermeasures Knight looked at was getting rid of double-decker buses.
To a degree, it's a moot point as the City of Ottawa already has a plan to phase them out due to, it says, current
and future ridership, capacity and service level estimates.
But Knight looked at it anyway because, as he put it, the very fact that passengers were seated so high is why the impact of the Westboro crash was so brutal.
Prohibiting double-deckers comes with a "big catch," however, as doing so could make streets less safe, Knight explained.
"Buses are often referred to as the safest mode of road passenger transport, and statistically that's true," he said.
Reduce the number of buses and there will be more cars on the road and "your total number of collisions would go up."
"It would prevent this specific collision," he said of eliminating double-deckers, "but I'm not sure it would be a good policy decision to take because probably the total number of deaths ... would increase."
WATCH | Looking back on the crash and its lingering impacts:
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