Two children hit by Yellowknife drivers in the space of a week

Yellowknife parents are sounding the alarm after reports of children hit by people driving in Yellowknife.

RCMP said two collisions took place in the week of June 24 in which children under the age of 12 were struck.

Matt Greyeyes says his 10-year-old son was hit while walking his bike across the crosswalk at Gitzel Street and Franklin Avenue by the Tommy Forest Ballpark on June 24.

“He called me from his phone, but he was so upset that there was another bystander there that quickly picked up the phone from him and said he’d been hit by a truck,” said Greyeyes.

The child’s wrist was fractured but he was otherwise fine, according to Greyeyes, who described his son as “white as a ghost when I got there – he was extremely scared.”

Greyeyes said the driver, in an F-150, was attempting a right turn on a red light when the collision occurred.

The driver remained at the scene and waited for police and an ambulance to arrive. RCMP said they have since been charged with failure to yield at a right of way, which carries a $100 penalty.

In general, Greyeyes said, “drivers need to be more cautious, especially in the summer with kids out of school.”

He would also like to see right turns on red lights prohibited in the area where his son was hit.

Police said another child under the age of 12 was struck by a vehicle on June 27 while riding their bike at the intersection of Franklin Avenue and Matonabee Street, just a few hundred metres from the site of the other collision.

In the same week as those collisions, Yellowknife city councillor Ben Hendriksen posted to Facebook about a driver who, he said, passed within a foot of him while he was biking home on School Draw Avenue.

He said this was the first time something like that had happened to him in Yellowknife.

“There are definitely people who I would say aren’t necessarily overly cautious of people on bikes or pedestrians, but rarely where they’re seemingly trying to put somebody in danger, as this seemed to be,” said Hendriksen.

Hendriksen, too, would like to see right turns on red lights prohibited in the area where the two children were struck, but he notes the NWT’s Motor Vehicles Act states rights-on-red are permitted across the territory.

The territorial legislation means the city can’t make a change at the municipal level without the NWT government first amending the act.

“If we’re looking at street safety,” Hendriksen said, “this is a pretty big one for pedestrians and people in transportation other than a vehicle.”

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