Fair warning to those who like their pedal to the metal while driving in the national parks – for the Labour Day long weekend, police will be out in force to put the brakes on speeding.
The Bow Valley Integrated Traffic Unit, RCMP and sheriffs, have stepped up speed enforcement throughout the month of August, and intend to have extra manpower on the road for the holiday weekend – typically one of the heaviest traffic weekends of the year.
While anyone who travels on highways through the national parks (Trans-Canada and Highway 93) knows, many drivers don’t adhere to the 90 km/h speed limit. But this August has been a crazy one on those roads.
While the BVITU wrote 762 speeding tickets in the area in July, August has seen particularly lead-footed drivers on the roads. As of Sunday (Aug. 26), police have written 1,350 speeding tickets. Of those, said Banff RCMP Cpl. Chris Blandford, 67 tickets went to drivers doing more than 50 km/h over the limit.
“And we fully expect to write 2,000 tickets this month. Last weekend (Aug. 18-19) we wrote 200 tickets in five hours at one location. We’re the busiest detachment in Alberta right now.”
Blandford estimates Bow Valley-area RCMP detachments have written up 25 per cent more speeding infractions than the next highest in the province.
“I don’t know what it is this month,” he said on Sunday. “I’ve never experienced this in the seven years I’ve worked here. Thankfully, there have been no crashes, but I think it’s just arrogance. People think ‘we’re going to drive whatever we want to, be damned with the speed limit is’.”
That type of arrogance was illustrated on Saturday (Aug. 25), with a driver Cst. Mike Chin stopped and ticketed for after using laser to clock him at 133 km/h near Redearth on the TCH. “I handed him the ticket and he just crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. I knew he was going to go right back to speeding.”
Chin radioed Blandford down the road, who then stopped the same driver just five minutes later, for doing 123 km/h ($493 for the two tickets). “When I stopped him,” said Blandford, “he said he was just keeping up with the traffic flow, but I had followed him for a while and he was passing everybody.
“That excuse of keeping up with the traffic flow is common, but it’s ridiculous. If everybody’s doing 180, do you?”
Sunday afternoon was a typical one on the Trans-Canada for this August. Traffic volumes were heavy and, as Blandford pointed out, “the vast majority of people are doing the speed limit. But sometimes for us, it’s just a matter of how fast you can write tickets.”
Using handheld laser units, Blandford, Chin and Cst. Mike Ganges pulled over a steady stream of speeders.
And the speeders weren’t those driving muscle or sports cars as some might expect. In a short period of time, a couple of Corvettes, Porsches and R8s passed the speed enforcement site at the bottom of Seven Mile Hill east of Banff; doing the speed limit.
On Sunday, the three RCMP members steadily pulled over vehicles like a Focus (115 km/h), Corolla (120), Journey (123), Fusion (126), Sorrento (127) Jeep (130), a Chevy ton (134) and a Ford minivan (142), among others.
“Sometimes, it’s non-stop,” said Ganges. “And it can be any kind of vehicle. I’ve seen Ferraris and Lamborghinis doing the speed limit, and I’m not saying they always are, but most of the time, it’s just regular vehicles.”
Catching these speeders doesn’t even require stealth on the part of the police. It’s not like they’re using unmarked photo radar vehicles, such as in Canmore. At the Seven Mile Hill location, a marked car was parked in the median between lanes and members were wearing high-visibility safety vests as they stood outside the car and directed laser in both east and westbound lanes.
At one point, Ganges was in a marked car about 500 metres down the road, with lights on while stopping a vehicle, and Blandford and Chin still pulled speeders over.
Lately, said Blandford, Calgary drivers are a main concern as they make up 25 per cent of the tickets being written. “Another 28 per cent are from areas outside Calgary serviced by the RCMP and 21 per cent are B.C. drivers.
“The Calgary drivers should know better, they’re more likely to be out here regularly.”
With speeding such a constant factor in the mountain parks, for the upcoming weekend, said Blandford, “everybody who’s available will be working.”
