Re: Dedicate police patrol to Malahat, (Our View, Oct. 17)
Before setting up a highway police unit on the Malahat mountain highway, we should ask how the dangerous drivers behave where they live – in fiefdoms like Saanich, Nanaimo, and on the mainland, most refusing to police properly.
Watch the streets anywhere and you’ll see most drivers don’t slow down in the rain. Many deliberately drive dangerously, at 80 km/h through playground zones and around blind curves on residential streets, not stopping when turning right at a red light nor at stop signs. Others are merely inattentive or sloppy. Much re-education is needed.
The Malahat is much less forgiving of error, but driver mentality is the same, general ignorance about driving physics is the same.
B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation has not done much to educate drivers that it is a mountain highway, claiming the expensive vague sign in View Royal does that – despite using clear bright signs elsewhere in the province.
Driver licensing isn’t working. The many drivers whose N placard indicates they recently passed a knowledge exam, but don’t want to benefit from using what they were taught.
The effective approach is police feet on the street, identifying and directly re-educating drivers. Didn’t the continuous campaign of increased enforcement on the Malahat show that last year? I expect it will take a year of increased police presence everywhere before most drivers get the message about proper behaviour on roads.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich
