DriveSmartBC

A reader has asked "What would happen to me if I was caught driving without a drivers licence?" It is a question that will expose serious consequences for you and the owner of the vehicle you are driving if it is not your own. I will confine my answer to the situation where you don't have a driver's licence either because you did not get one, it was expired or you did not have it properly reinstated after a suspension or prohibition.

The International Transport Forum's Road Safety Annual Report puts Canada in the middle of the OECD Countries for the percentage in change of road deaths from 2010 to 2018 showing a reduction of about 18%. The leader is Norway with about a 48% reduction and the worst is Costa Rica with in increase of about 38%.

The Transport Accident Commission (TAC) of Victoria, Australia reports that new research reveals the majority of the state’s road deaths happen because of a simple mistake committed by the driver.  In 2020, 71% of road deaths involved a basic error, as opposed to high-risk behaviours such as speeding, drink-driving and drug-driving.

My girls attend high school and daily I watch as many of these students fill their cars with friends while displaying the "N" reports a reader. They go on to say that they spoke to their girls about this and the girls said that these young people just ignore that stipulation because no one checks and it is a nuisance being allowed to only carry one passenger.

It's back to school time for students at Frank J. Ney Elementary School in Nanaimo and Nanaimo News Now is reporting conflicts between residents on Entwhisle Drive and Carriage Drive and the parents driving their children to the school. The residents do not want the parents to use "their" street to deliver children to school.

September 1, 2021 saw the implementation of a new website location and design for ICBC's driver training information. Of interest on the new site is information on teaching the new Class 1 driver Mandatory Entry Level Training known as MELT. There are already a number of driving schools that are offering MELT training and they can be found here.

Meet Monty, a railroad underpass in Melbourne, Australia that only has 3 m of clearance above the road surface. As you might guess, many vehicles greater than 3m high literally run into trouble at the underpass. This happens so frequently that there is even a website dedicated to keeping track of how many days have passed since the last crash!

We have come to expect that our highways will always be open to us to use at any time under all conditions. When something occurs, such as a serious collision, some drivers still think that their convenience takes priority over all other issues and the highway should not be closed to them.

This video is shared from the Protected Intersections for Bicyclists website. The author, Nick Falbo, explains that the concepts presented in the video are exploratory and experimental, but judging from the material provided on the site it might be more accurate if the words "in North America" were added. This appears to follow the standard Dutch design in a North American setting.

The state of New South Wales, Australia has just tightened their rules on intersection safety camera violations. Companies were not nominating the drivers of their vehicles who were responsible for the violations as that state requires. This amounted to approximately 7,000 events that drivers were not held accountable for.