It seems people across BC are becoming more creative to try and get away with the distracted driving.
The most recent example took place in Vancouver on Wednesday where the local police caught a man with an iPhone and a tablet fastened to his steering wheel.
Can't make it up. Guy had iPad and cell phone attached by strings on steering wheel while driving! Yes, that's his ticket he's holding. pic.twitter.com/h5WoA2ac87
— @VPDTraffic (@VPDTrafficUnit) November 15, 2017
Situations like these come down to people trying to do too much.
“Those sorts of things where you see someone’s gone through the effort of trying to put together a system and rigging a system so that they could be on their tablet, using their cell phone and you kind of wonder how we’re getting our priorities kind of out of sorts,” says Doug MacDonald, ICBC Road Safety Manager.
However, the driver was not fined $368 dollars for distracted driving along with the four penalty points and was just given an $81 infraction for driving without a license.
Even if the driver escaped more severe punishment from authorities, MacDonald says the potential for something way worse was still there.
“The chances are five times more being involved in a crash, if you’re distracted while you’re driving like that person in Vancouver there’s a lot of distractions going on let alone the driving that they’re doing with their vehicle.”
A lot of people who are on the road also allow themselves to become complacent when they travel on very familiar streets.
“People usually says we’re just going on the highway, we’re just going between A&B, there’s not that much traffic on that part of the road and I can make a few phone calls or I can check my messages. That’s exactly when you see people go off into the side of the road going into to the ditches on a straight stretch road because they’re not paying attention to the road conditions as they are,” added MacDonald.
Earlier this month, the provincial government and ICBC designated distracted driving as a high-risk driving behaviour under the auto insurance Driver Risk Premium program.
The new changes mean any time a driver accumulates two distracted driving tickets within a three-year period, the total for financial penalties could rise by as much as $2,000 – a $740 increase when compared to the existing penalties.
Currently, there are 12,000 drivers across the province who have multiple distracted driving offences over a three-year period.
Starting Mar. 1, 2018 drivers caught repeatedly disobeying BC’s ban on hand-held devices while driving will pay more https://t.co/Tz1SZ32EvD pic.twitter.com/cHWa9j1UNx
— ICBC (@icbc) November 6, 2017