As a sports car barrelled down the Malahat headed toward a wall of fog, two Greater Victoria police officers thought: Something has to change.
It was a seminal moment for constables Bima Ribeiro and Andy Dunstan, members of the Capital Regional District Integrated Road Safety Unit who are calling for dedicated enforcement.
“We were up there in February, and 250 metres ahead there is a solid fog bank — a solid wall of white — and we watched a sports car drive into the fog bank at 170 kilometres, not knowing if the cars ahead were doing 80 kilometres,” Ribeiro said.
The worst of the story is that it’s not rare, police say.
When CRD-IRSU officers such as Ribeiro set up in the bush along the stretch of highway from Goldstream Park to Mill Bay, they focus their laser devices (which measure time over distance) first on excessive speeders and aggressive and impaired drivers, because there are too many infractions to catch them all.
A six-hour stakeout from the early afternoon to early evening with CRD-IRSU members bears this out.
Drivers young and old, male and female, stand on the roadside stripped of their keys, cars and, in some cases, pride, having been caught for excessive speeding or impairment.
Excuses, excuses
When interviewed, some immediately recognize they were speeding into the capital region — to get to soccer, errands, his weekend with the kids, home — and why it’s wrong.
Others launch into reasons they are not “that guy” who speeds in a manner that could injure others. It’s all the others on the road who drive poorly; why don’t the cops focus on them? One young man argues full circle until he says: “I guess I’m that guy.”
Most of those caught for impairment at Shawnigan Lake Road as they turn off or onto the Malahat — blowing warnings to fails — are surprised.
(The legal limit is 80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood or .08. For new drivers, blood alcohol content must be zero.)
“I only had a five per cent cider; I’m only 145 pounds,” says one driver. “I drank a couple of beers but it was hours ago,” says another. “I had beer earlier with dinner and a brandy now with a coffee. I’m not a drinker. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket, for Christ’s sake,” says another.
The last man is a 65-year-old Royal Oak resident. You can smell the liquor on his breath. His vehicle is impounded for 30 days and he’s prohibited from driving for 90 days. He’s polite but seething.
Dunstan, on the other hand, is delighted. He takes a break to call his wife. It’s the 11th 90-day impound for impairment he has executed this year.
“To me that’s a success,” Dunstan says. “He was going to head down the Malahat into the CRD impaired.”
“You don’t know what you’re preventing,” Dunstan says. “Maybe he would have made it and been OK, or, gone down the road and killed himself and his passenger.
“I’ve been to too many fatals and seen the ripple effect. I don’t mind being that hard-ass on the street who offends people, because I believe in my heart I’m doing the right thing.”
A police officer when you need one
The line of people pulled over for speeding and impairment is an unsettling scene for responsible drivers who negotiate the winding stretch of mountainous highway with the belief that most oncoming drivers are equally aware and law-abiding.
“We’d love to have some regular enforcement up there throughout the calendar year and if we saw that, we’d have some real change in driving behaviour,” said acting Staff Sgt. Alex Yelovatz, unit commander for CRD-IRSU.
The unit says if driving behaviours on the Malahat are to change, dedicated enforcement, as well, as education should precede and then accompany the next phase of engineering improvements and medians.
“I think we have a very unique opportunity now, at this point in time, to bring about this holistic approach to dealing with a piece of road that has been affecting us for decades,” Ribeiro said.
“Every time someone dies, every time there is a significant closure, we talk about it, we become upset about it, we want something done about it — and then we don’t do anything about it,” he said.
Next year, the province will begin $34 million in safety upgrades to a five-kilometre section of the Malahat where, in November, Shawnigan Lake’s Dave Paulin, 33, was killed when his car was struck head-on by a pickup that crossed the centre line.
The project will expand the Trans-Canada Highway to four lanes through Malahat Village and add three kilometres of median barriers between Aspen Road and South Shawnigan Lake Road. It’s slated to conclude in 2018.
The last round of upgrades to the Malahat were completed in February at a cost of $15 million — $33 million overall since 2001, with 50 per cent of the 20-kilometre Malahat section now divided by a median barrier.
Police say it’s all three Es — engineering, education and enforcement — that are needed to change driving behaviours.
“If we don’t act now to provide this level of enforcement, what we are going to do is allow the driving public to habituate themselves to the changes to the roadway,” Ribeiro said.
“You can put barriers up and improve a line of sight, but unless people choose to drive better and safer, well, the outcome is up in the air,” he said.
Practically speaking, given the number of people speeding on the Malahat, dedicated enforcement should be funded to bring speeds down to at least the posted limits before trying to introduce construction zones of 50 kilometres an hour, said Dunstan.
It’s often about the money
The province’s IRSU teams grew out of an agreement between the Solicitor General’s Ministry and ICBC, whose gross program budget for enhanced traffic enforcement was $33.5 million in 2014-2015 (to which the federal government contributed $9.3 million). RCMP “E” Division Traffic Service delivers the program.
The program replaced the old practice in which ICBC paid police officers overtime to run CounterAttack and similar campaigns.
IRSU teams provide targeted enforcement, focusing on the top contributing factors to casualty crashes: Unrestrained occupants, speeding, distracted driving, intersections and impaired driving.
The CRD’s 15-member unit is composed of seconded officers: four from Victoria, four from Saanich, one from Oak Bay, one from Central Saanich and five from the RCMP.
The unit delivers enhanced enforcement throughout the region’s 13 municipalities and Salt Spring Island, complementing the work of municipal and RCMP-detachment traffic divisions. It is not meant to replace them.
In 2015, the unit issued 10,082 violation tickets.
CRD-IRSU’s boundary technically extends to Aspen Road on the Malahat, but on occasion they patrol its entire length to Mill Bay.
The south end of the Malahat is in the West Shore, but at the moment, West Shore RCMP does not have a dedicated traffic unit.
South Island Traffic Services is responsible for an area from Nanaimo to Sooke, Sidney and the Gulf Islands and, with that scope of coverage, can’t see dedicating more time to the Malahat.
“We’re already stretched quite thin,” said Cpl. Brad Robinson.
“It’s hard to put all my eggs in the Malahat basket because then I’ve neglected the rest of the Island on the south,” Robinson said.
South Island Traffic Services conducts enforcement on the Malahat up to about twice a month.
It received an additional 236 enforcement hours of funding for special campaigns in 2015-2016. In August, it allocated four shifts from that additional funding to the Malahat, posting the unit at areas from Bamberton Road to South Shawnigan Lake Road.
“We would always try to get more people to the Malahat. We know it’s a problem area,” said Robinson, “but there’s other problem areas and we’re trying to address them all.”
CRD-IRSU directs an average of about 20 hours a month (about two eight-hour shifts for a unit team) on the Malahat, from its general enforcement budget for the entire region.
In 2015- 2016, CRD-IRSU says it received 350 hours of funding for what’s called the Enhanced Road Safety Enforcement Initiative to be delivered throughout the region for special campaigns, such as road blocks during holiday seasons. The Malahat portion of that has already been used on targeted campaigns in May that resulted in 104 vehicles impounded — mostly for excessive speeding and impairment.
“Those [additional] hours have been used up,” Yelovatz said. “Had we continued on for another month, I’m thinking we would have had the same results.”
Once CRD-IRSU’s one-day presence on the Malahat disappears, driving behaviours resume, “as has been demonstrated in the past,” Yelovatz said.
Consistent, persistent, spontaneous enforcement is needed to change driving behaviours, Dunstan said.
“We haven’t been up at the Malahat properly since the end of May because we don’t have the funding, so we may be up there in dribs and drabs, but all you’re doing is putting a bandage on,” he said.
ICBC spokeswoman Lindsay Olsen said the current memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General expires on March 31, 2017.
“ICBC and the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General will begin discussions for the next MOU later this year,” Olsen said, in an email. “As such, it is too early to say if there will be any changes to the funding.”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General — asked if it was considering more funding for sustained Malahat enforcement in its next contract meeting with ICBC — said it does not direct police operations “and this includes CRD-IRSU operations.”
“Individual enforcement areas are not part of the discussions around the MOU between ICBC and government covering funding,” said spokeswoman Kate Trotter.
Speed kills
The Malahat Drive from Goldstream to Mill Bay takes 20 minutes to drive at the average posted maximum speed of 80 kilometres an hour recommended for dry roads and good visibility.
Ribeiro, who immigrated from Brazil as a child, said he loves that when Canadians bump into one another, both parties say sorry.
“But yet when we get behind the wheel, something happens, especially on the Malahat,” he said. “There is this psychology that if I pass you at 130 kilometres, I am getting that much further ahead than what I was, and yet we all end up at Ice Cream Mountain at the same time.”
The same psychology kicks in when drivers are presented with passing lanes on the Malahat, police say. Knowing the lanes are going to merge seems to provoke in some drivers a need to get ahead, even if it means risky manoeuvres and speeding.
As Rebeiro sits on his portable tripod chair on the edge of a cliff near Whittaker Road, camouflaged by yellow pearls of Scotch broom and prickly plants, he fixes the red dot of his laser device up to one kilometre ahead on southbound traffic racing ahead of the pack.
In just over an hour the unit catches 17 speeders, two of whom have their vehicles impounded for driving more than 40 kilometres above the posted speed limit. It’s a slower day for the unit.
The vehicles are barrelling toward the Shawnigan Lake Road cutoff, where northbound logging trucks can be seen chugging across the intersection.
Rebeiro radios the vehicle make, model, colour and other identifying features to fellow IRSU officers waiting at the intersection.
After a while, traffic officers such as Rebeiro say they can hear speeding — the bounce of tires and tearing up of the road surface — just as veteran cops at road stops can smell impairment.
Not only does speeding save very little time; more importantly, it reduces the reaction time needed to avoid crashes when the unexpected happens, Ribeiro said.
In March, provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall released a 260-page report on road safety called Where the Rubber Meets the Road that linked a spike in traffic fatalities to the B.C. Liberal government’s decision in 2001 to scrap the former NDP government’s photo-radar program, which started in 1996.
“This cancellation likely accounts in part for the subsequent increase in speed-related fatalities,” said Kendall, who recommended the government introduce a provincewide electronic speed-management program that could include photo radar or other technologies.
Transportation Minister Todd Stone said the B.C. government is committed to making roads safe, but made it clear that does not include installing photo radar, even on high-profile, crash-prone stretches of highway such as the Malahat.
Instead, in B.C., speed limits are most often enforced through conventional speed control, with law-enforcement officers using radar or laser speed-measurement devices.
The drawback is that such enforcement, unlike photo-radar-like devices, is not omnipresent, and drivers know that, Yelovatz said.
The advantage of conventional speed control through officers, however, is the immediacy of the punishment — speeders receive hand-delivered traffic fines, as well as losing their vehicle and keys while standing on the roadside.
That was evident on May 19, when police surprised motorists by setting up at 5:30 a.m. to patrol southbound Malahat commuter traffic prior to the May holiday long weekend.
In all, the police impounded 23 vehicles for excessive speed, including one novice motorcyclist driving 152 kilometres an hour, suspended one motorist for driving under the influence of a drug, issued 49 speeding tickets, wrote 11 tickets for other offences and handed out thousands of dollars in fines (not including related costs such as towing and daily impound charges).
Drivers were left stranded on the roadside getting cabs and tow trucks to drive them into town, only then to figure out what to do next.
“If that’s not a lesson, what is going to work?” Dunstan said. “The thought of those consequences should be enough for most sensible people to do the right thing. If you want to skirt around that, you have to look at yourself and face that you deserve those consequences, because you can’t say you didn’t know.”
Fatalities on the Malahat corridor are not among the highest in the province — 18 over a decade from 2004 -2014, according to ICBC — but Dunstan said collisions are especially severe, and take a huge emotional, physical and economic toll.
“We don’t have the highest number, but the collisions we do have are above average in their severity — there are more serious injuries and there are longer road closures,” Dunstan said.
Recall the horrific October 2012 crash near Whittaker Road that saw three women ages 31, 19 and 16 dead at the scene. Five other people went to hospital. A six-year-old girl miraculously survived. The highway was shut down in both directions for a significant period. Malahat Fire Chief Rob Patterson looked out at the crash site recently from his backyard and remembered the “violence” of the crash and the shocking number of fatalities.
“It happened right here,” Patterson said. The veteran firefighter rushed to the scene to find the six-year-old hanging by her car seat in a flipped Honda CRV carrying five people. Three occupants, including the girl’s mother, were dead.
The Honda CRV had lost control on the wet highway and skidded into a northbound GMC pickup carrying three adults.
“We started improving the highway up there and it seems like speeds are increasing,” Patterson said. “Additional enforcement can’t hurt.”
Patterson said the province took what was formerly called Nascar corner and re-engineered and widened the road, making it safer, but drivers continue to speed through it.
At that moment, Ribeiro’s laser recorded a white Honda driving northbound at 150 km/h in an 80-km/h zone — 70 km/h above the speed limit.
Patterson applauds the province for the sections of the Malahat where median barriers have been installed. But he points to vehicle after vehicle passing and speeding at least 20 kilometres over the speed limit as a testament that enforcement is equally important.
Patterson would go further than the current legislation for speeders and impaired drivers.
“The vehicles need to be seized and sold to fund policing in this area,” Patterson said.
B.C.’s health officer, in his report, also recommended the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General establish a more consistent approach to education, increase the visibility of enforcement and expand penalties and legal consequences for driver distraction and speeding — commensurate with penalties for alcohol-impaired driving, such as the Immediate Roadside Prohibition Program.
Patterson would welcome more targeted enforcement on the Malahat by CRD-IRSU, but would prefer Shawnigan Lake RCMP’s “under-staffed and under-resourced” traffic division to be beefed up.
Straddling several municipalities, the unifying aspect of the Malahat is it’s the only corridor connecting south and central Vancouver Island.
“It’s not a West Shore problem, a Victoria problem or Saanich problem, it’s a Greater Victoria-area problem, and when we effect change in that corridor, we effect change for everyone — that’s our perspective on it and our approach is long-term, consistent, unconventional enforcement,” Ribeiro said.
When you least expect it
When CRD-IRSU says it wants dedicated enforcement, it doesn’t mean 24-hour patrols, but rather more random, strategic enforcement any time of the day or week as deemed necessary.
Acting Victoria police chief Del Manak was the first unit commander of the original CRD-IRSU in summer 2004.
It was set up as a pilot program to bring together highly trained traffic-enforcement officers to complement existing municipal and RCMP traffic divisions to carry out strategic speed enforcement and impaired-driving roadblocks in high-crash corridors and intersections.
“I’m a huge, huge supporter of an integrated approach to road safety,” Manak said. “Our highways and major thoroughfares are connected all through Greater Victoria.”
Manak said Highway 17, the Pat Bay Highway from the Swartz Bay ferry terminal through to Blanshard Street, and the Trans-Canada Highway, which runs into Douglas Street, are prime examples of major thoroughfares running through several municipalities that demand an integrated approach.
Manak said CRD-IRSU must have the flexibility to patrol high-crash zones on the right day and during the right time period based on intelligence and input from a joint-management structure.
If that means more focus on the Malahat — while still being attentive to the needs of each contributing department — so be it, he said.
“So, if my officers are spending more time on the Malahat but … they are catching a lot of impaired drivers, guess where those impaired people are driving to?” Manak said.
“It is such a tragedy when you lose life on the road because it’s preventable,” Manak said. “If it’s preventable, we must make sure as the police we are doing our part … to make sure the road is safe for all users — women, elderly, families, children, everyone.”
Supt. Derek Cooke, the officer in charge of RCMP “E” Division Traffic Services, said there are more than 200 IRSU positions allocated throughout the province.
The locations, he said, are based on several factors, including serious-injury and fatal-collision rates, traffic volumes and geography.
Cooke manages a budget of about $1 million that is distributed to all RCMP traffic and IRSU units throughout the province to fund additional traffic-enforcement initiatives.
The CRD-Integrated Road Safety Unit is allocated its proportional share, Cooke said in an email.
“The CRD-IRSU has an obligation to address road-safety issues throughout the capital region and they are unable to solely focus on the Malahat highway,” said Cooke.
“You can, however, anticipate that the time and efforts expended by the CRD-IRSU on the Malahat highway will reflect the road-safety risk posed by the Malahat in consideration of other road-safety issues and locations throughout the region.”
But Chris Foord, past chairman of the CRD Traffic Safety Commission and community member on the board, argues more regular enforcement on the
Malahat would produce better results.
The commission provides money for education support, signs and publicity about traffic-enforcement campaigns.
“There was some discussion of committing up to $20,000 if that [enhanced Malahat enforcement] campaign does go ahead,” Foord said.
Given the B.C. government’s “political” view on photo radar or newer technologies as deterrents, enforcement must be better funded, Foord said.
“They are elected and it’s their call, but on the other hand, unless they are willing to go there, I don’t know that they have any other choice than to put more money into enforcement.”
