DriveSmartBC

One day in the not too distant future police will swipe your driver's licence through a card reader, pick the offence from a list on their computer screen and click print to issue you a traffic ticket. No more hand written ticket forms for BC drivers.

I would imagine that your opinion of police traffic surveillance tactics probably depends a lot on whether you are the recipient of a ticket or not because of them. You may have actually seen Corporal Smith in Nanaimo dressed up as the Easter Bunny or Constable Martell of Kelowna wearing a hoodie and holding up a sign made of cardboard. They certainly got to see a lot of traffic violators and provided information to pick up teams a bit further down the road.

Radar and laser detectors are currently legal to install in your vehicle and use to avoid prosecution for failing to follow the speed limits in British Columbia. One has to ask why BC is one of the few provinces in our country that has not made this illegal.

Got your quota yet? It was a jab that I heard often at the roadside and some days I really wanted to respond to it. "Yes, thank you. Yours means I get a new toaster!" Somehow I don't think the driver would have seen any humour in it.

I was issued a ticket for Speed Against a Municipal Sign for driving over 30km/hr in a playground zone. The officer had no laser and no radar; she flagged me over, saying "The speed limit here is 30--you were not doing 30." I can't say whether I was doing 31 or 51; my best guess based on the location I was pulled over would be somewhere between 30-40.

When a vehicle is in yaw it is rotating around a vertical axis through it's center of mass. The long, curved Y shaped marks left by the tires on the pavement were characteristic of this motion.

In some municipalities firefighters are attending collisions instead of the police. I've never felt comfortable with this decision for a number of reasons but even our government has joined in by removing the requirement to report collisions to the police.

It was always a challenge when the violator failed to produce their driver's license. Were they being truthful when they told me that they had forgotten it at home? Did the name, address and birth date that they gave me belong to someone else? That honest face was occasionally nothing more than window dressing.

I am curious how is it that it is possible for an officer to issue a ticket without actually witnessing the alleged offense, and only going by a couple of witness calls that likely do not have the plate number of the alleged offender and in a location that is not specific?

Why are radar locations are allowed to be broadcast on the radio road reports? I have seen, so many times, people drive slow where they know radar is, only to start speeding once they get past them. Isn't the idea of radar to catch the speeders?