Abstract Manager

The Yukon is known for its year-round outdoor lifestyle, and the City of Whitehorse is taking significant steps to improve vulnerable road user safety and support active transportation despite being home to extreme winter cold, significant snowfall, and less than five hours of daylight in the winter months.

Since 2023, the City has delivered traffic calming through one-off pilot projects. That approach surfaced challenges familiar to many small municipalities, including more requests than staff could action and no way to prioritize them, no consistent system for tracking requests, missed opportunities to integrate traffic calming into capital and road renewal projects, a limited annual budget, and a reliance on rotating co-op students.

In 2026, the City is transitioning from pilots to a formal traffic calming program — anchored by a decision-making framework, a public web map for submitting requests, standardized warrants for evaluating and prioritizing requests, an annual cycle aligned with budgeting, and permanent staff capacity. This presentation shares the strategies that helped the City of Whitehorse scale up its traffic calming approach, including:

• strengthening policy through a Transportation Master Plan with a Vision Zero target and a forthcoming Safe Mobility Action Plan
• introducing residential speed limit reductions
• leveraging technology to evaluate requests consistently and spot problem areas; and
• adapting tools to the local context, such as using snow clearing operates to determine whether a treatment is seasonal or year-round.