Roads not safer in Saanich: Accidents rose by 22% while the population grew by 3.4%,
This article presents a simple comparison of accident rates in Saanich from 2018 and 2024, along with a brief history of the policies adopted to improve Saanich’s roadways.
Accidents rose by 22% while the population growth was 3.4%, and Saanich reported a 6% reduction in vehicle road use from 2018 to 2024. These simple statistics suggest that the road safety policies and implementations over the years are not delivering the improvements to road safety often claimed by the municipality.
Ryan Henderson
Feb 3, 2026
If you have ever questioned the effectiveness of road safety improvements in Saanich in reducing crash and casualty statistics, it may not be as simple as comparing each year to the previous year and evaluating the implementation of these projects individually. After all, Covid 19 obviously affected how the citizens in Saanich travelled, and roadway projects have been accumulating over the years. Therefore, comparing the crash and casualty statistics before the pandemic and road projects to the most recent statistics would illuminate just how much safer we are if we accept that life and transportation on our roadways are relatively back to comparable volumes.
The most relevant and comparable year for normal traffic flows is 2018, as it is the full year before the pandemic and when Saanich adopted and implemented its Active Transportation Plan (ATP). The Active Transportation Plan 2018 was the first incantation of the municipality’s Vision Zero rubric, where changes in roadways in Saanich were attributed to Safetyism and Vision Zero: Vision Zero, the ideology from Sweden in the late 90s. Then in 2022, Saanich adopted the Road Safety Action Plan to achieve Vision Zero, and more roadway changes occurred: more bollards on roads, more concrete slabs, more speed signs in unstudied roadways…
Here is the simplest comparable statistic. According to crash and casualty statistics from ICBC in 2018, there were 567 accidents in Saanich. In 2024 (the most recent data set from ICBC), there were 693. That is 126 more crashes. That is a 22.222…% increase in accidents.
I was explaining these statistics to somebody the other day. I made an analogy to imagine an organization that had a five-year plan, and one of its top goals was to implement policies that improved safety. By the end of that five-year plan, accidents had increased by 22.222…%. Then the people who implemented these policies do not acknowledge the failure or correct it, but instead laud themselves and the projects they created.
Now, people defending these projects and ideologies may look for any excuse to rebuke or obfuscate these statistics, such as an increase in population. However, based on data from the District of Saanich and provincial population estimates, the population of the District of Saanich in 2018 was approximately121,294. The District of Saanich’s population is estimated by the CRD to be 125,436 residents in 2024. That is a 3.4% increase in population.
If Saanich’s Active Transportation FINAL 2024 page ES. 6 is to be believed, people are not using personal vehicles by about 1 percent a year: in 2011, 18%, and by 2030, 36%. Therefore, from 2018 to 2024, according to Saanich, there has been a 6% reduction in people using personal vehicles due to active transportation. Therefore, the excuse that an increase in population is moot, if not worse, for the 3.4% increase in population. In fact, it would make the accident rate slightly worse if this difference were introduced as a variable for accident rates.
On page 6 of the Active Transportation Plan FINAL 2024, it states that Saanich received the 2019 Silver award for Excellence in Policy Planning from the City & Urban Areas by the Planning Institute of BC (PIBC).
Maybe the PIBC should have waited for the data to have a critical and objective process of evaluation before handing out awards.
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