Pedestrian injury frequently results in devastating and costly injuries and accounts for 11% of all road user fatalities. In the United States in 2006 there were 4,784 fatalities and 61,000 injuries from pedestrian injury, and in 2007 there were 4,654 fatalities and 70,000 injuries. In Canada, injury is the leading cause of death for those under 45 years of age and the fourth most common cause of death for all ages Traumatic pedestrian injury results in nearly 4000 hospitalizations in Canada annually. These injuries result from the interplay of modifiable environmental factors. The objective of this study was to determine links between the built environment and pedestrian injury hotspots in Vancouver.

The ‘data revolution’ marks a time of growing interest and investment in data – big, small, or otherwise. Critical attention to data is also proliferating, exposing the diverse ways that data produces inequality of opportunity and harm in society. This paper draws the nascent field of critical data studies into conversation with emerging narratives in data-for-development (D4D) to advance the conceptualization of data inequalities, explaining how they both align with and diverge from core tropes of digital inequalities research – and why this matters for development. The paper examines the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to three ‘data divides’ – access to data, representation of the world as data, and control over data flows – through examples of digital identity systems and national data infrastructures, user-generated data, and personal behavioral data produced through corporate platforms. This understanding provides a basis for future research, practice, and policymaking on data-related (in)equalities in development contexts and beyond.

A rapidly accelerating phase of capitalism based on asymmetrical personal data accumulation poses significant concerns for democratic societies, yet the concepts used to understand and challenge practices of dataveillance are insufficient or poorly elaborated. Against a backdrop of growing corporate power enabled by legal lethargy and the secrecy of the personal data industry, this paper makes explicit how the practices inherent to what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’ are threats to social justice, based on the normative principle that they prevent parity of participation in social life. This paper draws on Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘abnormal justice’ to characterize the separation of people from their personal data and its accumulation by corporations as an economic injustice of maldistribution. This initial injustice is also the key mechanism by which further opaque but significant forms of injustice are enabled in surveillance capitalism—sociocultural misrecognition which occurs when personal data are algorithmically processed and subject to categorization, and political misrepresentation which renders people democratically voiceless, unable to challenge misuses of their data. In situating corporate dataveillance practices as a threat to social justice, this paper calls for more explicit conceptual development of the social harms of asymmetrical personal data accumulation and analytics, and more hopefully, attention to the requirements needed to recast personal data as an agent of equality rather than oppression.

Human behaviour is an obvious, yet under-studied factor in pedestrian injury. Behavioural interventions that address rule violations by pedestrians and motorists could potentially reduce the frequency of pedestrian injury. In this study, a method was developed to examine road-rule non-compliance by pedestrians and motorists. The purpose of the study was to examine the potential association between violations made by pedestrians and motorists at signalized intersections, and collisions between pedestrians and motor-vehicles. The underlying hypothesis is that high-incident pedestrian intersections are likely to vary with respect to their aetiology, and thus are likely to require individualized interventions – based on the type and rate of pedestrian and motorist violation. High-incident pedestrian injury intersections in Vancouver, Canada were identified using geographic information systems. Road-rule violations by pedestrians and motorists were documented at each incident hotspot by a team of observers at several different time periods during the day. Approximately 9,000 pedestrians and 18,000 vehicles were observed in total. In total for all observed intersections, over 2000 (21%) pedestrians committed one of the observed pedestrian road-crossing violations, while approximately 1000 (5.9%) drivers committed one of the observed motorist violations. Great variability in road-rule violations was observed between intersections, and also within intersections at different observation periods. Both motorists and pedestrians were frequently observed committing road-rule violations at signalized intersections, suggesting a potential human behavioural contribution to pedestrian injury at the study sites. These results suggest that each intersection may have unique mechanisms that contribute to pedestrian injury, and may require targeted behavioural interventions. The method described in this study provides the basis for understanding the relationship between violations and pedestrian injury risk at urban intersections. Findings could be applied to targeted prevention campaigns designed to reduce the number of pedestrian injuries at signalized intersections.

Background: Providing palliative care is a growing priority for health service administrators worldwide as the populations of many nations continue to age rapidly. In many countries, palliative care services are presently inadequate and this problem will be exacerbated in the coming years. The provision of palliative care, moreover, has been piecemeal in many jurisdictions and there is little distinction made at present between levels of service provision. There is a pressing need to determine which populations do not enjoy access to specialized palliative care services in particular. Methods: Catchments around existing specialized palliative care services in the Canadian province of British Columbia were calculated based on real road travel time. Census block face population counts were linked to postal codes associated with road segments in order to determine the percentage of the total population more than one hour road travel time from specialized palliative care. Results: Whilst 81% of the province's population resides within one hour from at least one specialized palliative care service, spatial access varies greatly by regional health authority. Based on the definition of specialized palliative care adopted for the study, the Northern Health Authority has, for instance, just two such service locations, and well over half of its population do not have reasonable spatial access to such care. Conclusion: Strategic location analysis methods must be developed and used to accurately locate future palliative services in order to provide spatial access to the greatest number of people, and to ensure that limited health resources are allocated wisely. Improved spatial access has the potential to reduce travel-times for patients, for palliative care workers making home visits, and for travelling practitioners. These methods are particularly useful for health service planners – and provide a means to rationalize their decision-making. Moreover, they are extendable to a number of health service allocation problems.