Miscellaneous

Electric cars are extremely quiet, offering some welcome silence in our cities. But they also bring new dangers, since they can easily sneak up on unsuspecting pedestrians. What kind of sounds should they make to keep people safe? Get a preview of what the future may sound like as acoustic engineer and musician Renzo Vitale shows how he's composing a voice for electric cars.

Twenty years of traffic law enforcement experience has (mis)shaped what I find entertaining, so every Thursday I find myself reading the beefs in the Nanaimo News Bulletin's Beefs and Bouquets feature. There is almost always at least one beef about the way someone has used or misused the road over the past week.

This is a short trip down memory lane with a retired traffic cop: me. I've just recently completed a round trip from Vancouver Island to the West Kootenays and back and had plenty of time to think along the way. There were ghosts along Highway 3 from the Manning Park works yard to Rock Creek, one of my old patrol areas.

I just finished reading an article titled "Old People Should..." in the May 2019 edition of the Reader's Digest. It explained that we could find out what people ask Google most often by seeing how the search engine auto filled our queries. The top result for "old people should" was that they should not drive.

I took the idea one step further and searched on "drivers should."

The Malahat highway is the main north / south artery for southern Vancouver Island. Due, among other reasons, to it's relatively serious collision history that shuts down this highway for hours at a time, the provincial government is looking at ways to improve travel on the highway.

Does your community have a Traffic Safety Commission? The Capital Regional District's Traffic Safety Commission suggests that if you don't, you should. The Start a Commission page on their web site lists 10 reasons why and 10 suggestions on how start one.

Matthew Catling received two traffic tickets, one in Richmond for speeding in a municipality and one in Vancouver for using an electronic device. Mr. Catling filed separate Constitutional Question Act notices on both the Richmond and Robson Square prosecutions on November 2, 2017, and November 24, 2017, respectively. He asserted that s. 63.1 of the Offence Act violates Sections 7 and 11(d) of the Charter.

For my final article of 2024 I turned social media and asked people there what they thought were important road safety issues to review. Within a very short time I had five suggestions to write about.

Have you ever given any thought to how efficiently traffic lights control the flow of vehicles? I found out last Friday afternoon at 5:30 pm as I traveled the 7.6 kilometers between Superior Road in Lantzville and Northwest Bay Road in Nanoose Bay on Highway 19. Total elapsed time: 40 minutes for a trip Google Maps says should take 5 minutes.

In general, traffic enforcement is a solitary effort for police outside of the province's municipalities. I've often wondered just how close I have come to something bad happening in a traffic stop while I was a long way away from the nearest backup. Since today is Thanksgiving, I want to tell a story where something bad did almost happen and I'm very thankful for the "almost."