Last year, the Bow Valley Integrated Traffic Unit (BVITU), RCMP and sheriffs handed out over 10,000 speeding tickets in Banff National Park, and this year isn’t looking much better, with over 2,600 speeders caught in the park so far for 2014.
“The majority are from Calgary,” BVITU team leader RCMP Cpl. Chris Blandford said. “It isn’t necessarily related to vacationing or tourism travelling. We’re out in the mornings and afternoons dealing with ski traffic and that’s to help deal with speeding and keeping people honest.
“During the summer months, morning till about nine at night, we have the bulk of our traffic – and in the park speeders are not specific to one specific time in a day, it’s all day, all the time.”
According to police, the majority of speeders being apprehended are not in high performance vehicles.
“It’s everything,” Blandford said. “The second fastest speed I got last year was 205 km/h and that was a Ford Focus – just a plain car, there’s nothing special about it. In his case, he was going to meet his sister in Lake Louise – that was it – that was his excuse.
“The fastest was two weeks before him (Ford Focus driver), almost in the same location and again the guy didn’t offer any excuse. Initially I got him at 156 km/h and when I got in behind him he continually increased to a point where he was at 212 km/h,” Blandford said.
“In a case like that we’ll normally also charge with dangerous driving. In his case, he plead out to careless driving and the speeding and he received just over a $2,500 fine and a three-month driving suspension.”
Blandford and other RCMP members and sheriffs are not just on the lookout for high-speed offenders. Within an hour of being on the Trans-Canada Highway in the park, Sunday (April 6), Blandford pulled over two vehicles travelling about 125 km/h who were ticketed with a fine of $240. Police have heard from the public that they want a clear message sent to speeders.
“I’ve worked here in the valley for eight years and we have never had anything like we did last year. It was 10,229 speeding charges – that’s the highest I’ve ever experienced in my 25 years and the public has spoken,” Blandford said.
“They’re tired of seeing people speeding through the park and they’re tired of animals being killed. We can’t say these animals are being killed because of speed, but, considering the amount of people travelling through the park, there’s always the high probability they were going a little fast when the animal’s death occurred – so it was time to get aggressive and we decided that we are going to continue to be aggressive this year.”
Blandford says police are tired of hearing the same excuses from apprehended speeders and want them to know they’re wasting their breath. “The most common is, ‘I was just going with the flow of traffic,’ and we even had one fellow last year who was doing between 180 and 200 km/h and he had the gall to suggest he was going with the flow of traffic.
“People have to understand they’re running their own vehicle and to suggest that other people are the cause of them speeding is ridiculous,” Blandford said. “Some people actually go to court with that excuse and it just doesn’t work; never does.”
Another excuse Blandford and other police members hear too often is, ‘I thought it was a 110 km/h zone?’ to explain why they’re doing 120 km/h or 130 or 140 or faster.
“This is a national park … this is a place where people can come to enjoy nature. For some this could be their first time in this type of environment, which isn’t a bad thing. They’re concentrating on their driving, but they are also concentrating on the surroundings and these individuals that we’re catching at high speeds have to take into account these other people,” Blandford said on the need for Albertans to remember a large number of summer traffic contains international tourists.
“We’re going to continue doing our job, we’re going to be aggressive in what we do and if you’re speeding in the park you’re going to have one of us stop you,” Blandford said. “There’s an extremely high probability you’ll be driving away with a ticket in your possession, and in some cases find yourself in court as a result of speeding.”
Usually a speeder clocked at 51 km/h over the speed limit warrants an automatic court appearance.
“They feel that they go by one police vehicle and feel they are in the clear, and they ramp it up again – and much to their surprise there’s another police car to meet them,” said Blandford.
Blandford says another item that is going to be utilized this year in the park based on the success achieved at other areas in the province is the use of hunting blinds by officers for speed radar.
