A Calgary city councillor is looking to the city for options in order to make a Northeast Calgary intersection safer a week after a child was involved in a hit and run in the area.
Twelve-year-old Bentley St. John was on his way to school on Tuesday, March 10, when he was hit by a white vehicle in a marked crosswalk at Taradale Drive and Taravista Way.
“We need to do something because yes, it is dangerous,” says Ward 5 Coun. Raj Dhaliwal.
During a meeting at city hall on Tuesday, Dhaliwal asked administration to tell the “residents of Taradale and Ward 5 what tangible and safety measures, interventions can be immediately deployed to enhance the pedestrian safety at this intersection.”
Operational services general manager Doug Morgan responded by saying that there are no records of any collisions at the intersection over the past 19 years based on the collision database.
“We had a collision in November 2023 within the playground zone,” he said. “We took action by installing … physical traffic calming measures to slow the traffic down. We did look at this intersection. There are marked crosswalks, as we saw in the video, and this was a blatant error or mistake by the driver as well as the drivers that drove by.”
Get breaking National news
Get breaking Canada news delivered to your inbox as it happens so you won’t miss a trending story.
Dhaliwal said he was surprised to see that there was no data for that specific intersection.
“What does that mean now? Does that mean that people are not reporting enough? Maybe they’re reactive to an incident, but we got to be more proactive,” said Dhaliwal.
Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas says despite there not being any past issues at the intersection, there’s still the need to double down on enforcement, engineering and education.
“This is a massive issue for Calgarians. We are likely to be seeing in this year the most dangerous year ever in Calgary’s history to be a pedestrian,” Farkas says.
According to statistics from Calgary police, there were nearly 80 pedestrians hit in the city between Jan 1 and Feb. 28 of this year. Those numbers, however, don’t include pedestrians hit during the month of March including Bentley.
During a media scrum, Dhaliwal told reporters that his request for pedestrian lights at Tarra Lake Way and Taradale Drive last year was fulfilled, and hopes to get another at the intersection of Taradale Drive and Taravista Way.
“We need to do a proper control there, and maybe pedestrian lights … will be a solution,” says Dhaliwal.
Bentley’s uncle, Garry Sinclair, tells Global News that he doesn’t think having pedestrian lights will reduce the number of pedestrians being hit.
“I don’t think it would make a difference. I’ve been at intersections with streetlights (and when) it’s telling you to cross, you start crossing and people still are ignoring it,” he says.
Sinclair says Bentley is still at home recovering with a broken leg.
Calgary police say they are still looking for the suspect vehicle that was involved in the hit and run.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
