Are Collisions an Acceptable Risk of Driving?

Collisions have not been required by law to be reported to the police for quite some time now. In many municipalities today the police don't even attend collisions unless someone has been hurt or killed. Instead, the fire department may show up and the firefighters help participants exchange information and clear the scene. There are no traffic tickets issued to offenders who cause minor injury and property damage collisions when this is the case.

ICBC tells me that it cannot provide complete and accurate collision information for the province because the police no longer report collisions. Don't you find it odd that the agency charged with collision reduction doesn't have a clear picture of the scope of the problem? No doubt you have heard the proverb "Look after the pennies and the dollars will look after themselves." Can we afford to ignore collisions that through fortune didn't turn out to be serious?

I asked both ICBC and the Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles how many collisions a driver had to cause before some corrective action was taken if the driver was not ticketed. The Superintendent directed me to ICBC and ICBC said that a prohibition from driving could result, but it would be based on the driver's record of violations. Re-testing or mandatory training were not commented on, even though I asked about this explicitly.

It appears to me that minor collisions are becoming just another acceptable risk that we assume when we drive on BC highways. The direct costs are spread among us all via insurance and the indirect costs are either not compensated for or are covered through taxation. Will the size of these acceptable risks increase in future because of the situation today?

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I've often wondered why

I've often wondered why drivers who are deemed at fault for a collision aren't issued a ticket. I think a driver who causes a collision is much more deserving of a ticket than drivers who, for example, slowly creep across the stop line at an empty 4 way stop without first having come to a complete stop.

Many drivers that I know routinely creep through right-on-red turns or 4 way stops without first coming to a full stop. Should there be an enforcement project targeting this action, they'd instantly be hit with a fine, points and possible insurance premium increases. All for an acttion that was performed so slowly that it wouldn't even scuff a bumper should a collision occur.

It doesn't seem like an appropriate use of resources to ignore the actions that cause collisions to instead spend time penalizing those that don't.

A different perspective

It is not ICBC's mandate (legislatively or otherwise) to reduce collisions. While it is certainly in their best interests to do so, and while the government typically takes your insurance premium dollars and uses them to promote crash reduction, the responsible entitly would be the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. Historically the ICBC has spent premium dollars on advertising/promotion of safe driving, "black spot" remediation (fixing up dangerous portions of highways or intersections through infrastructure improvement), Counter Attack funding and the like.

The BC government has for many years treated our premium dollars as tax revenue, to the point where people start to actually believe that it's appropriate for them to do so.

Don't get me wrong. Most of the time the goals are laudable, but the source of the revenue should not be through "hidden" taxes via insurance premiums.

The police should be financially supported through appropriate tax revenue, which one would expect would come from the Ministry of Transportation. This is the entity that should be "blamed" for insufficient funding and data collection as related to traffic crashes.

I believe this to be an important distinction, as we already have enough to complain about when it comes to insurance companies, and the reality that is their business model - they take your money and don't pay out on claims: that's their means of profit and very existence.

Collisions