After the Lapu-Lapu Day Tragedy, How Can We Keep Events Safe?

It was a day of sun, laughter, music and food — a joyful celebration of Filipino culture and a chance to connect with neighbours and friends.

But shortly after the Lapu-Lapu Day community festival had wrapped up on April 26, an SUV ripped through the departing crowd, sending bodies flying. In the coming days, the death toll would rise to 11 people — including two young children.

It was the first such incident to happen in Vancouver, but vehicle attacks have become common around the world. Some, like the van attack in Toronto in 2018, are deliberate attempts to injure or kill many people based on political ideology. For others, like the Lapu-Lapu Day incident or a similar tragic event in Liverpool a few weeks later, terrorism is quickly ruled out, with mental illness or drug use appearing to play a part.

In Vancouver and around the world, cities and event organizers are grappling with prevention measures.

“It’s an unexpected and shocking thing for a vehicle to pretend that you're not there,” said Sandy James, a former Vancouver city planner who is now the director of Walk Metro Vancouver.

“What it really comes back to is, when citizens in a city take back a space for a festival, how do we ensure that they're safe? And I think that's the bottom line.”

The Tyee spoke with James and urban planner Denis Agar, Vancouver Coun. Pete Fry and pedestrian safety group Vision Zero to walk us through what they’ve been hearing and thinking about when it comes to keeping special events safe for pedestrians.

While we can’t plan for every unexpected incident or person intent on causing harm, they say some changes can protect people from cars being used as weapons.

Pay attention to community asks

James emphasized that the process needs to start with ideas from community members themselves — not a top-down approach from city hall. As an example, James talked about block parties in East Vancouver that have stationed their barbecues behind the flimsy vehicle barriers the city currently provides, adding an extra bulwark to prevent cars from driving onto the closed street.

Just a few weeks after the Lapu-Lapu Day incident, Fry walked around the Sunset neighbourhood with people who had survived the attack. He said those community members have been asking for traffic calming for years in the Fraser and 41st Avenue area, and they pointed out specific intersections where they want traffic circles installed — with plans to plant the favourite flower of one of the victims.

James said she’s also noticed that sidewalks in the area are in rough shape. She said the city should prioritize making the sidewalks and boulevards safe, welcoming places for pedestrians to gather and memorialize the Lapu-Lapu Day attack. Fry and James also noted that survivors and witnesses will continue to deal with the trauma of not feeling safe around cars.

“We've not offered a good pedestrian environment,” James said. “The first thing the city could do is move that up and get that done, because that is going be an area where people are going to want to pay respect and light candles and be at for a very long time.”

While these improvements wouldn’t have prevented the Lapu-Lapu Day attack, Fry said there’s a new focus on “our coexistence with multi-thousand-pound metal objects that can maim and crush a human body.”

“I've had to think, just even standing at a crosswalk — cars are driving by, you're waiting for the light — any momentary lapse or intentional action could be completely life altering,” Fry said.

Barriers and bollards

In an interim report on the Lapu-Lapu Day attack, the city said staff and the Vancouver Police Department have been using a variety of barriers to prevent “vehicle incidents” since 2016. Those include “heavy barriers,” like dump trucks filled with sand that can be parked across the entrance of a closed street, as well as “light” barriers like vans, trucks or police vehicles. The city has also bought 16 heavy metal barriers that can be moved from site to site as needed.

But the Lapu-Lapu Day event had only sawhorse-style barriers, staffed with volunteers, to prevent cars from driving into the closed street.

Denis Agar, an urban planner who focuses on transportation and public transit, attended the Lap-Lapu Day block party and said he was struck by the difference between it and the similar Khatsahlano Street Party. Agar said the Khatsahlano event included the big dump trucks full of sand as well as more checks for drivers who needed to access the site. (The Lapu-Lapu Day attack happened at the end of the festival, when it would be common for cars to be let in to help pack up.)

James said cities can get creative with barriers for temporary street closures.

“In Amsterdam, there's a lot of street markets and I went to and visited and biked around with the planner that takes care of them,” James said. “They have movable carts. And you won't even know what they are — they have flowers and plants in them. They look wooden on the outside, but they are large enough that the vehicle cannot go through the space.”

Agar is in favour of another solution that’s heavily used in European cities: bollards. The metal or concrete barriers can be permanently fixed in place or can retract to allow cars in some times and close the street at others. The advantage to using bollards is that vehicles cannot drive through them without sustaining serious damage, as illustrated by the videos collected by the longtime Twitter/X account of the World Bollard Association.

Bollards might not be possible for temporary street closures for community events and festivals, but Agar said they should be used much more often in Canadian cities to protect pedestrians on sidewalks or when streets are closed to cars.

Agar also warned about requiring safety measures that will end up raising the cost of community events, making them too expensive to put on.

“Should the city bear that cost on behalf of the festival? I'm inclined to think so,” Agar said.

Move events to parks

One way events could be better protected is to move them off city streets and into parks, James suggested.

“A lot of park space is defensible. You'll see a lot of them will have a really open grass ditch, and the vehicles can't drive into the park,” James said.

Many city festivals also involve and help boost local businesses, Agar pointed out, so there would be a trade-off to locating special events inside parks. The logistics of bringing in supplies and equipment and making sure people who use wheelchairs can easily access the event would also have to be considered.

“But I do kind of like it from that perspective of just being able to have these gatherings away from vehicle access,” Agar said.

The big picture: lower speeds, smaller cars

Over the past few years, Vancouver has seen some terrible examples of cars striking pedestrians on sidewalks, highlighting the cost of designing our cities with not enough emphasis on keeping pedestrians safe from vehicles.

On a downtown walk, Agar pointed out to The Tyee that sidewalk infrastructure like light posts is designed to break off at the base to protect car occupants in the event of a collision. But pedestrians who could be in the path of the crashing car aren’t protected.

“We can't lose sight of the fact that the Lapu-Lapu attack at the end of the day was an act of violence that used a vehicle,” said Cal Rosete, a member of Vision Zero Vancouver, a road safety advocacy group.

“It's a very clear example of a failure to design streets effectively and failure to implement policy that keeps our community safe.

“With this specific event, we need to take the question from ‘How can we prevent someone struggling with their mental health from committing violence?’ and move to ‘Why do we make it so easy for anyone to get behind the wheel to kill people?’”

The driver in the Lapu-Lapu Day attack was driving an SUV. Rosete said victims are more likely to sustain serious injuries, die or be dragged under the vehicle if they are hit by an SUV.

“SUVs these days are quite large, and they hit you above your centre of gravity,” Rosete said.

Rosete called for a range of design changes to city streets, from traffic calming to lower speed limits and street design that forces drivers to slow down.

Vision Zero has been critical of the governing ABC party’s approach to road safety. For example, when opposition Coun. Christine Boyle introduced a motion to lower the speed limit on Cornwall Street to 30 kilometres per hour, the motion passed only after ABC Coun. Mike Klassen amended it to raise the speed limit to 40 km/h. A motion to add more red-light cameras to intersections was also sent back to staff for further study.

“I'm Filipino, and when I was reading the news, my first response was pure heartbreak,” Rosete said of the Lapu-Lapu Day tragedy. “But my second response was, ‘How do we live in a city where this is something that can even happen in the first place?’”