Family of Saskatoon cyclist killed last year pushes for regulatory changes to truck safety
SGI says it's communicating with Transport Canada on Direct Vision Standard pilot project
Tod Fox says police told him his late wife took one look behind her, to check on her two sons, before cycling into the crosswalk during a walk signal.
Moments later, 33-year-old Natasha Fox was struck and killed by an Inland Concrete truck at the intersection of College Drive and Wiggins Avenue in Saskatoon on May 24, 2023. Police did not lay charges in the incident.
Tod believes that if the driver had a better sight line, they would have seen Natasha crossing beside the truck and stopped, preventing her death.
He's now advocating for governments to implement the Direct Vision Standard (DVS), a system pioneered in the U.K. that sets minimum requirements for the visibility of vulnerable road users from large vehicles. Some examples of visibility measures include lower cabs and bus-like doors with longer windows.
"To me, it's important that everybody knows that this could have been prevented," Fox said. "We can do better and we need to."
Natasha's father, Doug Kramble, said his daughter's death was not an "accident," but a "traffic fatality."
"You really need to make sure that these large vehicles take care of, and are allowed to take care of, the vulnerable road users," he said.
He's confident Natasha would still be alive if there was better truck safety and infrastructure.
Kramble wants regulations like the DVS implemented in Canada, forcing companies to abide instead of leaving it up to choice.
"I would like my daughter back but I can't have that, so the next thing I would like is to … see that this doesn't happen to someone else's daughter, someone else's spouse, someone else's mother," he said.
Seeking change to regulations
Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) said Transport Canada has the expertise and authority to implement vehicle manufacturing standards.
"SGI is aware of a federal pilot project regarding the Direct Vision Standard technology and, following our conversation with Tod and Doug, we are now in the process of connecting with our counterparts at Transport Canada to discuss the results of their pilot," Michaela Solomon, an SGI spokesperson, said in an emailed statement.
CBC has contacted Transport Canada and is awaiting a response.
Heidelberg Materials owns Inland Concrete, the truck company involved in the incident, according to Jeff Sieg, director of corporate communications in North America for Heidelberg Materials.
Heidelberg owns trucks in the U.K. that are bound by DVS, but Sieg said the company cannot implement DVS in Saskatchewan, because it would be a regulatory change.
"We're safety advocates as well, but it's not necessarily our place to do that," Sieg said.
Natasha's family members say they spoke with people from Heidelberg Materials about advocating for DVS in Canada, given their concrete trucks in London are required to meet the London standard. Heidelberg Materials declined the request.
In response, Tod told Heidelberg he would not support the company attaching Natasha's name to a University of Saskatchewan scholarship, as it had offered.
Sieg said he would not discuss the results of the internal investigation following Natasha's death, or any resulting changes. He also would not speculate on whether regulations from DVS would have saved Natasha's life, but pointed to a different safety measure being rolled out to the company's concrete trucks in Western Canadian regions, including in Saskatoon.
Sieg said the new program involves cameras facing directly in front of the vehicle and into the cab to allow the review of events during and after, and enable the use of artificial intelligence and route planning. He did not have a timeline for when those changes are set to roll out.
"Anything that can help us be a safer company is something that we absolutely look at and we evaluate and we see if there's something we can implement," Sieg said.
"The issue of detecting pedestrians and cyclists on the sides of the vehicle is a real challenge. However, we believe that a radar-based technology that can alert drivers in real-time (much like what is installed in newer cars) is a more viable solution for us than cameras for this specific issue and we are in the very early stages of exploring that technology," he said.
Tod said the measures Heidelberg plans to roll out cannot, in his opinion, substitute for DVS.
Saskatoon Mayor Charlie Clark said he first heard of DVS and the breadth of the issue with truck blind spots when Tod spoke at a city committee meeting last week.
Clark offered Tod the city's help in advocating for changes to trucking safety, though he does not believe the city itself can make the regulations.
In an emailed statement last week, city manager Jeff Jorgenson said Tod's presentation was compelling.
"The City will be looking into a possible pilot project to retrofit some City vehicles with enhanced visibility measures so that we can evaluate their effectiveness," Jorgenson said.
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