A spectacular single-vehicle crash on Montroyal Boulevard Wednesday morning has neighbours calling for traffic calming on the street they say is like a speed zone.
Police, fire and ambulance responded to the corner of Montroyal and Madeley Road just after 10: 30 a.m. when a speeding SUV slid of the slick road and down a steep ravine.
"(She) was going too fast in rainy road conditions prior to the curve in the road. The driver lost control of vehicle, drove off the road, hit a tree . . . and descended, backward, down the embankment and fell perfectly into the river trench below," said Cpl. Richard De Jong, North Vancouver RCMP spokesman.
The ravine runs by the property of Colin and Jamie Lake, who saw the incident play out.
"I phoned 9-1-1 because I thought there's no way whoever's in the car is going to make it out because it's a 40-foot drop into the creek," said Colin.
Luckily, the woman was not injured in the tumble, De Jong said, but she was issued a ticket for driving without due care. The SUV had to be lifted out of the creek with the use of a crane.
The Lakes have witnessed several accidents on the strip of road over the years - the equalizer in all of them being too much speed as drivers head east from Delbrook Ave.
"It's a constant thing that's going on around here. It's a tight little corner and yesterday just woke everybody up in the neighbourhood that something has to be done," Jamie said. "A lot of this stuff is not reported because people back out and get the hell out of Dodge."
The Lakes have asked the District of North Vancouver and the RCMP to bring in some traffic-calming measures for Montroyal in the past but to no avail.
"A road like Montroyal is meant to be a through-street to carry a larger volume of traffic. On arterial roads like Montroyal, we don't put in traffic calming, said Steve Ono, the district's general manager of engineering services. "That's a practice that's in keeping with national standards for traffic calming."
According to the district's last road safety review, that intersection did not place in the top 40 traffic spots in most need of attention. Still the district will take another look, Ono said.
"We'll at least try and get some data on the area - traffic speed and volume counts and find out how bad the problem is. We'll have our technicians look at the geometry to see if there is a need," he said.
From the RCMP's perspective, that strip of road isn't particularly dangerous.
"It's not a high-risk area," De Jong said. "If 400 cars went by there in one morning and one didn't, it's usually driver error that causes these sorts of accidents, that's driving without due care."
