Standing in the pouring rain with Richmond RCMP’s Sgt. Nigel Pronger, it wasn’t the ease with which his team identified and ticketed distracted drivers that took me by surprise.
Aside from the utter arrogance of using their cellphones while behind the wheel, I was astonished the moronic motorists in question failed to spot the hi-vis jacketed officers “hiding” behind trees and lampposts.
Believe me, as vehicles crawled to a halt at the Garden City Road and Westminster Highway intersection last Thursday, inconspicuous the Mounties were not.
But there in, inadvertently, lies a lesson in itself for those clinging by their text-happy digits to the hair-brained theory that cellphone use while driving is no less of a distraction than drinking coffee or talking to a passenger.
I’m sorry, if you’re so engrossed in your device that you cannot see an illuminous yellow, 200-pound, six-foot-tall officer lying in wait, then you simply shouldn’t be given the keys to a potentially lethal weapon.
And, while we’re at it, such was the level of stupidity required to get caught, I question whether you should even be allowed to vote in an election that affects people’s lives.
Every March, during the blitz on distracted drivers, it never ceases to amaze me the level of self-importance displayed by so-called “distracted drivers.”
In B.C., distracted driving-related crashes claim, on average, 78 lives, with 27 in the Lower Mainland alone.
Anecdotally, Sgt. Pronger feels we may have plateaued in terms of the prevalence of the outright dangerous practise.
He’s hoping that, along with increased enforcement and the heavier $368 fine, technology in new cars will also make it more difficult for drivers to give in to temptation.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and drivers who feel their texts are more important than my life or yours are always going to justify to themselves picking up their devices.
Remember the excuses drunk drivers used to — and still do — come up with to legitimize steering home while buzzed?
Where there was once laughter and back-slapping, there is now frowning and condemnation.
Fines and penalty points can only do so much. Until they start seizing people’s phones and cars on the spot, we’ll barely scratch the surface.
A great deterrent in my early days as a court reporter in the UK was naming and shaming drunk drivers.
Offenders were horrified to learn their neighbours and colleagues were all going read how Joe Blow, 42, drove home while four times the legal limit.
I lost count of the number of times a Mr. Blow would sheepishly, outside of court, ask I don’t put their name in the paper.
Short of speeding up our painfully slow court system in B.C. — which rules out this paper naming and shaming — it’s incumbent upon all of us to be judge, jury and executioner.
So the next time you see someone you know using their phone while driving, let them know what you think.
Unless you still think it’s OK?
Alan Campbell is a reporter with the Richmond News.
