The pandemic had obvious impacts on traffic in BC. Noteworthy as well are the BC trends in traffic enforcement in the last two years.
Early in the pandemic, there was almost no traffic on the roads as everyone remained at home, hoping this would blow over as quickly as possible. Interestingly, police reported to us that despite the huge drop in traffic, their numbers i.e. the overall number of traffic stops for tickets and impaired driving, remained stable. There were a few obvious reasons for this.
On the one hand, there were fewer cars. If a police officer has a road full of speeding cars, it can be difficult to pick out the one speeder who stands out. As well, with that wide open road, people put the pedal to the metal thinking it was something they could get away with. And many people thought there would be no police on the road.
Turns out the police were all over the road because they couldn’t hang out in the police station or the donut shop. The safe place for the police to maintain distancing was to be in their cruisers, out on the road.
Consequently, the number of infractions remained stable in 2020 when the pandemic restrictions were at their peak. Who would have predicted that?
As it turns out, not the police. They expected a pandemic drop in impaired driving, but it didn’t materialize. What we all learned was that it’s easier to identify the likely impaired driver when there are few cars on the road and there are lots of police on the road.
Fast forward to 2022 and now we have the stats for the second year of the pandemic, and now we have a very different story.
Even though bars, restaurants and sporting events have been back for much of the year, and everyone is back on the road, driving often more dangerously than ever before, in BC the numbers have dropped massively when it comes to drunk driving offences.
We would like to say that people are learning and becoming more responsible, but we know that’s not realistic. Accidents from bad driving and DUI driving haven’t demonstrated a consequent decline. What has declined is enforcement. There are a few apparent reasons for that but mostly it comes down to cuts to enforcement.
To some extent what’s playing out is something we predicted when the Immediate Roadside Prohibition scheme was introduced in 2010. Budgets for DUI enforcement faced slow cuts across the board because the scheme was introduced to save money. When it did, then the budget was cut. And cut.
More disconcerting for British Columbians, however, is the significant decline in traffic enforcement in 2021.
We have been discussing this with officers from around the province because in addition to drunk driving cases, we defend Violation Tickets and other Motor Vehicle Act offences right across the province. With few exceptions, such as Abbotsford, police are reporting to use that their traffic divisions are lacking officers, often they have no capacity to do traffic enforcement and as this plays out, the key people who train traffic officers are aging out.
When the coach retired, the team fell apart. That’s what we’re seeing.
Bad driving kills over 250 people each year in BC. Thousands more are injured. Imagine if the police put the same resources into traffic enforcement as they do per death in homicide investigations?
During the holiday drunk driving enforcement period in 2021, there were very few roadblocks. In Vancouver the DUI enforcement team has been disbanded. Key officers have retired and are not being replaced. We know that consistent, visible enforcement is the best way to discourage anit-social behaviour.
If the trend toward inadequate traffic enforcement continues in British Columbia, we can reasonably expect the number of deaths and serious injuries to increase.
We can’t imagine that any of us want it to go that way. Many police officers share our concerns. We expect that those allocating resources will not realize what’s happening until something tragic happens – until it’s too late.