How Many Traffic Tickets Did Police Write?

In the past, if you were curious to find out about the traffic tickets issued by B.C. law enforcement officers you could either read a PDF document published by ICBC or make a request for specific information from their stored data.

The trouble was, sometimes those information requests took a significant period of time to fill and you had to know how to manipulate the information once you had received it.

Data for Traffic Tickets On Line

ICBC now publishes a data set for traffic tickets written by police and other law enforcement agencies in B.C. using Tableau Public.

This free platform allows you to create visualizations of the data yourself or use a collection of parameters and filters to sort and narrow the search in order to find only what you need or are curious about.

Where to Start

Your visit to the data starts on the Contraventions Intro Page.

A collection of choices in the form of links in gray rectangles appears across the top of the page along with the terms of the open data licence.

The logical place to start is at the far right with the explanation of how to use the interface.

The Contraventions Data Set

If you would like to jump right in instead, click on the Contraventions Data Set.

You will be presented with complete data for the full years preceding the current one. Data for the current year appears to end about 6 months prior to the time of your visit. 

There are 14 segments available to categorize the types of traffic tickets:

1. Commercial Vehicles
2. Cyclists
3. Driving Without Due Care
4. Electronic Device Use
5. Flight From Police
6. Graduated Licensing Program (GLP)
7. Impaired Driving
8. Intersections
9. Motorcylists
10. Occupant Restraints
11. Other Criminal Code
12. Other Motor Vehicle Act
13. Other Motor Vehicle Act Regulations
14. Speeding

Clicking on one of these segment links will show the total of related contraventions for that year.

Seeing Just the Data You Want

In the blue rectangles for each year is a link that will present all categories along with a dozen filters in a column on the right side of the page. Picking and applying filters to the data removes everything that you do not want to see.

There is the odd error to be found in the data as 2020 saw a contravention by a pedestrian in Kelowna for Speed Against Highway Sign!

Saving Your Work

Once you have isolated the data, icons in the upper right of the page allow you to download or share it with others. E-mail, Twitter and Facebook options may be chosen.

Intersection Safety Camera Data

Traffic tickets issued by intersection safety cameras are listed elsewhere. There is a summary page that lists totals for the program and a data catalogue that allows you to download camera statistics by location in a spreadsheet file.

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