A group of 15 mayors on the island of Montreal think it's time for its motorists to join the Canadian mainstream and be allowed to turn right on red lights, arguing that the city's drivers don't deserve their reputation for lead-footed recklessness.
Montreal remains, with New York City, the only jurisdiction in North America that bans right turns on red lights, a prohibition that has rested in part on the notion that the city needed some civility to counter motorists' laissez-faire attitudes toward traffic rules.
However, the mayors point out that 13 years after Québec permitted rights-on-reds everywhere in the province except Montreal, road fatalities have continued to drop. The number of vehicles on Québec's roads almost tripled from 1973 to 2015, while the number of road fatalities plummeted by 83 per cent during the same period.
"I don't know where the myth comes from that we're bad drivers," Philippe Roy, the Mayor of Mount Royal, said in an interview on Tuesday. "We have statistics showing that Québec compares well to what we see in Ontario or the northern U.S."
Québec's road-safety record, he said, "proves that behaviours have improved."
Despite the numbers, opinions suggest that many consider Montreal motorists to be too aggressive to be trusted with the same rights as others on the continent. One recurring quip is that you can't turn right on a red light in Montreal, but you can go straight through one.
In fact, Montreal is a city where the kinds of common courtesies prevalent in most Canadian cities are ignored. Pedestrians can't expect to be given right-of-way on crosswalks, for example. And pedestrians don't always abide by all the rules, either: A 2003 study found that 90 per cent of Toronto pedestrians wait on the sidewalk for the light to turn green before crossing the street, compared with 53 per cent of Montrealers; nine out of 10 pedestrians in Toronto respect traffic lights, while in Montreal, it's 76 per cent.
Many in Montreal are sticking to their "better red than dead" mantra, saying the mayors' proposal for cars poses too many risks for non-motorists. The mayors' proposal, which requires a change to the Highway Safety Code from the Québec government, is meeting up with resistance from cycling groups, public-health officials, as well as the mayor of Montreal.
Figures link half a dozen deaths to right-on-reds in Québec since the measure was brought in.
"One death is one death too many," Mayor Denis Coderre said in a statement issued by his office. Montreal has invested over the years in making the streets more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly, and the mayor says it wants to increase "co-habitation." The road network has to be "conceived to protect the most vulnerable users," the mayor said.
Vélo-Québec, which represents cyclists, also opposes the mayors' idea, saying rights-on-reds will increase risks for both cyclists and pedestrians, with limited benefits. It notes that the measure – which gained popularity in the United States during the 1970s energy crisis – saves only three litres of gas annually a car, according to a 2002 study for the Québec Transport Ministry.
As for time, it saves 30 seconds a trip, or no more than one minute a day, according to the study.
"What are the gains, really?" asked Dr. Patrick Morency, an injury-prevention expert with Montreal's public-health agency. "Everywhere in North America where it exists, it's been associated with injuries, mostly to pedestrians and cyclists. They pay the price."
For their part, the 15 mayors say the measure would save time, money and improve air quality. They say it's also popular. They commissioned a CROP poll of 1,000 respondents across Montreal, which suggested that three in four residents favour the idea of lifting the rights-on-reds ban.
"It's a subject that citizens constantly ask us: Why are we treated differently than elsewhere?" Mr. Roy said.
The mayors represent 240,000 people of the nearly 1.9 million people living on the island of Montreal, mostly in bedroom communities around the city of Montreal proper.
They say they don't envision rights-on-reds everywhere and downtown would probably be excluded. But they believe it would work in most of Montreal's 2,500 intersections.