SGI launches blitz against distracted drivers
Saskatoon Police Insp. Brian Shalovelo gets visibly agitated as he talks about distracted drivers in the city.
He and his colleagues have caught drivers texting, applying makeup and one man who had even rigged up a device so he could watch movies while driving.
“It’s causing injuries, it’s causing fatalities and that’s just quite frankly not acceptable,” Shalovelo said.
“It’s the innocent person or persons in a vehicle along with their family, obeying the rules of the road, paying attention, that are going to be hit and possibly injured or killed by some of these people who don’t put a priority on road safety.”
Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) is putting a focus on distracted driving this month with law enforcement officers across the province using a variety of methods to catch drivers who are on their cellphones or who are otherwise not paying attention to the roads.
Shalovelo said this might include plain clothes officers patrolling boulevards in the middle of streets, plain clothes officers on motorcycles and officers in unmarked police cars.
SGI spokesman Tyler McMurchy said the number of distracted driving incidents is “not getting better.”
In 2016, 42 people were killed and 1,205 people were injured in collisions where distracted driving was a factor. Distracted driving has become the No. 1 cause of collisions in Saskatchewan and the secondleading cause of fatal crashes after drunk driving (in 2016, 22.2 per cent of fatal accidents were caused by drunk driving and 15.9 per cent were caused by distracted driving).
Drivers caught driving while distracted will receive a $280 fine and four demerit points. Under legislative changes that came into effect partway through 2014, people caught texting and driving two or more times in a one-year period will have their vehicles impounded for seven days. Last year, 22 vehicles were impounded due to driving while using their cellphones. Twenty-six vehicles were impounded in 2015 and 14 in 2014.
For the month of August, police and RCMP issued 459 tickets for people who were driving distracted in Saskatchewan — more than 15 a day. Nearly three-quarters of the tickets — 342 — were for people using cellphones.
At an event Tuesday, SGI and the Saskatoon Police Service invited media to drive through a police driving course while juggling activities such as texting, eating and applying makeup. View the video at thestarphoenix.com.