4 cars have gone over Ontario highway guardrails in past week. What’s behind it?

Four separate vehicles in Ontario have crashed after hitting packed snow on the shoulder of a highway, sending them over guardrails in the past week.

The most recent occurred this past Sunday when Ontario Provincial Police said a vehicle travelling southbound on Highway 427 in Toronto struck the right side of the overpass to Highway 401.

“The vehicle ramped up and over the concrete barrier and upon landing, collided with a transport truck on the eastbound lanes on Highway 401 before finally landing on its roof near the Eglinton Avenue exit on the highway,” OPP said in a news release.

Two people were transported to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

On Friday, a vehicle lost control on icy roads and hit snow on the shoulder, but trees and bushes kept it from falling onto the QEW below after it went over the guardrail.

Then on Jan. 26, two vehicles in separate incidents launched over the Highway 7/8 flyover after hitting snow on the shoulder, which had created a ramp. The driver of the first vehicle was uninjured, but in the second incident hours later, the driver was killed.

Both of those incidents occurred following a winter storm that hit the region on Jan. 25.

In all four cases, snow had built up along the side of the road against the guardrail after being pushed there by snowplows.

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OPP noted following the Jan. 30 crash that “unprecedented amounts of snowfall coupled with extremely frigid temperatures have created unpredictable and dynamic driving conditions this winter.”

Sgt. Kerry Schmidt, spokesperson for the OPP Highway Safety Division, said in most cases “driver error” was a likely issue.

“We will shut down the highways when the roads aren’t passable,” Schmidt said Wednesday. “But when the roads are bare and dry, or maybe a little bit of wetness from plowing and salting and a driver loses control and hits the snow that’s been piled up against the shoulder, that comes down to driver error.”

Following the pair of crashes on Jan. 26, Schmidt told Global News the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) and OPP were looking at human, mechanical and environmental factors.

He also said while four crashes in a week may seem rare, he’s seen similar instances on ramps and overpasses in previous winters.

“This is not without precedent,” he said. “This is just something that unfortunately I’ve come to, not expect, but not be surprised by because it is driver behaviour and driver behaviour doesn’t change.”

Global News reached out to MTO to inquire about its snowplowing practices, but did not hear back by publication.

Scott Butler, executive director of Ontario Good Roads, said while fault can fall on the driver, the conditions they’re put in is at issue as well.

“It’s easy to blame drivers, I think, in every consideration … the courts do assign a portion of liability when cases go to trial,” he said. “But fundamentally, I think the higher order public policy outcome should be ensuring we are designing roads in a way that recognize the vulnerabilities in those systems and try to mitigate, as much as possible, really detrimental outcomes from happening.”

A majority of these recent incidents also occurred on overpasses, a section of road that civil engineering professor Liping Fu noted can freeze quicker.

“These locations, they’re what we called a hot spot, and the temperature is usually lower than regular roads and they’re very easy to cause formation of ice, sometimes black ice,” said Fu, who teaches at the University of Waterloo.

The curves on overpasses and onramps can increase difficulty, which is why Schmidt urges added caution.

“When there’s a lateral acceleration when you’re going around a corner, you rely on that friction and traction of your tires, and if you have winter tires, that’s great, but there’s still a limit to that,” Schmidt said.

“If you end up losing control or ending up, you know, drifting off and then panicking and over-correcting, over-steering, over-braking, it could send a vehicle into a skid, into a slide and put you out of control.”