I want the city to put a stop sign on my street to slow down the traffic going through my neighbourhood. If we don't do something about it, someone is going to get hurt! The trouble is, many things that we think are appropriate are not good solutions to road safety problems.
I happened to be on the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway #1) on Vancouver Island during the big snow storm just before Christmas, travelling from Victoria to Parksville, and there were some occasions where I wondered about the sanity of pick-up truck drivers.
Paul Hergott is a personal injury lawyer that practices in Kelowna are regularly writes on road safety. One of his latest articles compares the newspaper headline “Dangerously icy roads lead to crashes” with “Deep water leads to drowning.” His position is that we need to grumble and complain about drivers who fail to use good winter tires and who overdrive the conditions. Not about the naturally occurring ice and snow.
Quite some time ago I wrote about an initiative to trade your ticket for driver training. I was very pleased with the outcome of the one instance that I tried on my own, but the program never took off as the provincial government required the RCMP to provide it to all drivers if it was implemented. The Victoria Police Department is trying something similar through Restorative Justice Victoria.
The new year will bring changes to how drivers are re-examined to insure that they are safe to continue to drive. Current DriveABLE testing will be replaced by an Enhanced Road Assessment (ERA) that will be administered by ICBC at no cost.
You don't just keep your vehicle clean so that it looks good anymore. The sensors for your vehicle's safety systems need to be kept clean so that they will function as intended as well. This video from Consumer Reports describes six sensors that your newer vehicle may be equipped with and the maintenance that they need to continue to protect you properly.
It's night and I'm driving into the gray cotton of fog caused by a lingering temperature inversion. Vision is limited, the roads are wet, it's just a few degrees above freezing and some of the traffic to my left is driving like it's a sunny afternoon in August.
This video is an explanation of the Dutch Sustainable Safety policy by Peter Furth. It is the Dutch national approach to road safety.
In my time as a driver I've seen the technology for headlights progress from tungsten filament glass sealed beams to quartz halogen, high intensity discharge and now LED and even laser. There is more light on the road today from the driver's point of view than there has ever been.
Jewel Taylor was issued a 3 count violation ticket in North Vancouver and in February of 2016 paid the fines shown on the ticket. She subsequently received a bill from ICBC for the point penalties involved totalling $640. Shortly after that she applied for an extension of time to appeal her conviction. She was 18 months late in doing so according to the Criminal Rules of the Supreme Court of British Columbia.