Students have been back to the books for one month and so far traffic through school zones hasn’t been too bad, says municipal enforcement.
During the first two full weeks of the school year, 12 violation tickets had been issued in Okotoks school zones, which municipal enforcement manager Tim Stobbs said is actually pretty good.
“Mind you, we have a pretty heavy presence there in the first several weeks of school,” said Stobbs. “In partnership with the RCMP we kind of flood it.”
He said having patrols in schools zones helps to make parents and other drivers aware of the school zones coming back into effect after the summer, and people tend to drive carefully through September. As people begin to fall back into their routines, things become more relaxed and drivers tend to become more careless, he said.
To counter that, municipal enforcement officers spend nine hours per day in Okotoks school zones. Three cars each take on a different school for one hour during the morning rush and one hour after school, he said. Time is also split between the north and south schools, he said.
“We pay particular attention to the high-volume areas such as Dr. Morris Gibson and St. Mary’s,” said Stobbs. “Every school has it’s challenges, but the elementaries – and especially the high-traffic volume ones – are the worst.”
He said older schools in town were built before traffic flow was part of the design process, and crunch times before and after school put a strain on adjacent roadways.
While there have not been any child fatalities in school zones since Stobbs began working in Okotoks in 2006, he said there have been some minor incidents, and that’s bad enough. It’s all about keeping children safe, he said.
“With 30 per cent of our population 19 years and younger, think about the challenges that places on schools,” said Stobbs. “We have potentially 10,000 young people going to school, so we have to invest a lot of our time and energy into protecting that group.”
Dr. Morris Gibson principal Kevin Newman said he appreciates the efforts of municipal enforcement, and the bylaw officers work closely with the school to ensure the safety of its students.
He said speed is not the issue around the school, where the amount of traffic naturally limits how fast people can drive. His biggest concern is impatient drivers making unsafe decisions.
“Before and after school our four-way stops get backed up, both of them, and it may take you five minutes to get through instead of the one minute it normally would,” said Newman. “But we need drivers to pay attention and be patient there, not to make those u-turns or other dangerous things that put the kids at risk. It’s all about the safety of our students.”
