Top 10 most dangerous intersections in Vancouver, BC

These are the top 10 most dangerous intersections in Vancouver

These stickers are spreading awareness.

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1 / 1 Vision Zero Vancouver, a volunteer citizen advocacy group, is spreading awareness on traffic incidents through stickers.@siobhanwanders/Twitter

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"A person was killed by a motorist here," reads a sticker plastered to a pole at a Vancouver intersection. Below it is another sticker states that 108 crashes happen at this intersection each year.

Are Vancouver intersections really so dangerous?

There are 500 "memorial" stickers and 1,000 stickers stating crash statistics around the city, all made and distributed by Vision Zero Vancouver (VZV), a volunteer citizen advocacy group aiming to reduce the number of traffic incidents resulting in injury or death in the Lower Mainland.

The stickers are meant to "show the magnitude of how frequent theses crashes are, and how widespread" and to raise public awareness, a VZV spokesperson tells V.I.A. "Some people might think that crashes are very rare 'fluke' events, but in reality they happen everywhere, and in huge numbers."

Two other stickers are peeled to poles around the city. The first bears a "no right on red" slogan, although it isn't tied to a petition or movement. It's "just the early stages raising a bit of public awareness about a law that would prevent a lot of crashes," VZV explains.

The second reads "drivers injure or kill over 500 pedestrians a year in Vancouver" and shows a QR code leading to a screenshot of an ICBC map showing Vancouver intersections where a pedestrian was hit by a driver between 2016 and 2020.

How dangerous are Vancouver intersections?

According to the same map, which displays data on crashes between 2018 and 2022, 3,240 crashes happened within the five-year span, resulting in an average of 648 incidents per year.

In 2022, that number was 555. The highest number of incidents happened at the intersections of East Hastings and Main Street (9), the turning lane at Cambie Street and 49th Avenue (8), Cambie Street and Southwest Marine Drive (5), and at Main Street and Terminal Avenue (5).

The first two intersections -- Hastings and Main streets, and Cambie Street and 49th Avenue -- remain the top two most dangerous spots for pedestrians across a five-year span.

Another chart by ICBC shows casualty crashes, where there are injuries or fatalities, in B.C. between 2018 and 2022. Last year, there were over 35,000 casualty crashes in the Lower Mainland, which accounts for both the Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley regions.