MD of Foothills patrol officers have issued more fines and tickets last year.
The department has completed recovering and rebuilding from the 2013 flood and is now working at full capacity.
The number of tickets issued in the MD of Foothills for traffic and bylaw infractions rose 89 per cent in 2015 over the previous year. There was also an increase of $133,000 in fines collected.
MD protective services coordinator Darlene Roblin said the increases do not reflect a change in enforcement, but rather a return to business as usual.
“The big reasons for the large increase is that 2015 was the first year post-flood we were able to get all our equipment back in place,” said Roblin. “We lost four of our five vehicles in the flood and we lost our office so 80 per cent of our equipment was also gone.”
She said 2015 was a “reasonably normal” year for Foothills Patrol. In addition to responding to resident complaints, officers have been paying particular attention to excessive speeding and commercial vehicles. Last year, two drivers were clocked driving 72 km/h over the posted speed limit, and nine were ticketed for driving between 60 km/h and 70 km/h over the limit, she said. The incidents occurred in different locations throughout the MD.
Roblin said dangerous speeds pose a huge safety concern not only for other drivers being put at risk, but for the driver should they come across wildlife or other obstructions.
“Those are extreme rates of speed and it’s a pretty consistent problem,” she said. “At that speed, there would be no survivors.”
In addition to stopping speeders, her officers are also on the lookout for people failing to stop at stop signs or yield at uncontrolled intersections, which are the cause of many collisions in rural Alberta, she said.
She said the primary focus in traffic safety is public safety, and Foothills Patrol witnesses dangerous behaviour on a regular basis.
“We see these dangerous drivers and speeders, and we catch them as we can,” said Roblin. “But we also end up responding to a lot of collisions and seeing the aftermath of that kind of behaviour.”
She said the traffic safety issues are particularly important for commercial vehicles, especially securing cargo and managing loads properly.
“If something comes flying off a load and flies toward someone else’s vehicle, it can have deadly consequences,” said Roblin.
Officers also watch for overweight vehicles traveling on MD roads, an offense that can carry a pretty hefty fine.
The government issues road bans to limit load weight, usually in the spring when frost is coming out of the ground and road surfaces become soft and easily damaged, she said. During those bans, fines are even higher. Fines are based on a provincial model based on axle weight limits on particular roads, which indicates a dollar amount per kilogram overweight, she said.
“They can be quite substantial, sometimes in the thousands of dollars,” said Roblin. “They’re made to deter drivers from hauling oversized loads.”
Overweight loads can damage roads but also pose safety concerns if they have to travel across bridges, she said.
