Information relating to the government and traffic laws.
Adventures in Active Transportation is a blog post by Tannis Braithwaite, a member of the BC Cycling Coalition. In it, she highlights some of the barriers to active transportation in B.C., especially as they apply to provincial (non-municipal) highways. The focus here is still on moving motor vehicles, not active transportation.
This article was written in May of 2015 when there was a brief flurry in the media about the implementation of electronic traffic tickets and dispute adjudication replacing traffic court. Amendments to the Motor Vehicle Act to allow these changes were made in 2012, but fast forward to March 2022 and no changes to traffic ticket disputes have occurred.
RoadSafetyBC has published a report, Motor Vehicle Related Crashes, Injuries and Fatalities: 10 Year Statistics for British Columbia, 2011-2020.
British Columbia's Traffic Fine Revenue Sharing program transfers the net revenue from traffic tickets back to local governments as a source of additional funds to support community safety and address local policing priorities. Transfer grant amounts are based on an area’s policing costs relative to the total policing costs paid.
The International Transport Forum's Road Safety Annual Report puts Canada in the middle of the OECD Countries for the percentage in change of road deaths from 2010 to 2018 showing a reduction of about 18%. The leader is Norway with about a 48% reduction and the worst is Costa Rica with in increase of about 38%.
RoadSafetyBC secured funding of $612,000 from Transport Canada's Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program for the BC Road Safety Revitalization Project. The project addresses address current and emerging road safety issues across the province, with wide-ranging and varied delivery locations.
Crowdsourcing is where an organization obtains ideas from a large, relatively open and often rapidly evolving group of participants. An example of how this can be applied to road safety is found in the Spring 2021 edition of Transportation Talk, a publication of the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers.
Major changes to the way auto insurance in BC functions took place without fanfare on May 1. According to a summary outlining the key changes on the Borden Ladner Gervais LLP web site, you will no longer be able to take legal action for most motor vehicle collision claims.
This report on auto safety from nader.org is aimed at the new Biden administration in the United States. It advocates turning the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from "a sporadic, meek consultant to the auto giants" to a strong law enforcement agency. Citing "NHTSA’s inaction and institutional abandonment by Congress and the White House," and "NHTSA’s tiny budget, now far less than what is spent on military bands" it expresses the hope that the administration will begin a new day of public safety.
Imagine how difficult the job must be to keep the 494 chapters of the provincial statutes of British Columbia in order. The legislation that they contain must be added to in order to reflect what we need today, amended as circumstances change and the courts rule on their use and finally repealed as they no longer reflect our wants and needs. Small wonder that some things slip through the cracks.