I remember when I came to Canada how my great uncle taught me to respect the police. I don’t know what he thought, because I was not a gang member, I was doing well in school, I wasn’t a problem in school, my parents didn’t let me run amok breaking laws, and even though I had immigrated to Canada from what was ostensibly a Third World country, the strata of society in which I lived was anything but Third World.
Somewhere along the way, I had my eyes opened though.
I didn’t join any gangs, I didn’t engage in the sexual assaults some of my elementary school friends allegedly perpetrated or partake of the kinds of substances they abused, I just carried on being a “good kid”. I joined Air Cadets, excelled there, and went on to become an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. The Forces decided I wasn’t as good as the impression I had given them in the recruitment process, and so they kicked me to the kerb. C’est la vie. A blessing in disguise, and I think if their training was half as good as they thought it was, I’d have had the full career I signed up for, and may even be a senior officer there now. Or I may not be, and I’d be a veteran with a distinguished career behind me doing what veterans do with themselves after they serve.
Instead, I’m no longer on the books of the Forces, but the books of police services around the country, in the Lower Mainland specifically.
You see, I’m known as a speeder. Yes, apparently I drive very fast in all sorts of municipalities around Greater Vancouver and southwest BC.
So what do I do? Hundreds of kilometres an hour through school zones? Stunts on the road? Come to screeching stops at traffic lights? Not quite. I’ve had a clean driving record for 20-25 years. I don’t even remember what the number is, because I don’t remember a time when I blew through a stop sign or red light and smoked that minivan full of two families heading to the beach. If that happened, I’d remember the date and time and how long it has been since then, but it never did. But despite that, you’d think that was exactly the kind of record I had judging by what ICBC and the various police forces think about me.
Photo radar
Speed and red-light camera warning sign.
My first reminder of Big Brother was an inconspicuous envelope in the mail. Two of them, actually. I’ve recently taken up driving my mother around because she was negatively affected by damage to one of her eyes (and her other eye sucks anyway), and I’m the only son left because one of her sons decided sometime ago to estrange himself from the family, and the other is focussed on himself and can’t help out on week days between 9 and 5. (It’s called having a job, but he and other family weren’t so supportive when I was doing what I needed to do to earn income and wasn’t doing so well, and he’s a hypocrite, so I don’t feel the need to be supportive of him now.) Those two envelopes were photo radar tickets. Yes, contrary to popular belief, we still have that here. The BC Liberal government took a hint from the public a few years ago and got rid of the old photo radar where a van sits on the side of the road and takes pictures of speeders as they go by, but the NDP got the idea to combine red-light cameras with photo-radar cameras, and now you have photo radar at multiple random locations around BC.
And how fast was I going? 150 km/h? 250 km/h? For one ticket I was going 80 km/h and the other 81 km/h. About 3 hours apart. On the same afternoon and evening when the weather was dry and the light and visibility were perfectly fine. Pretty consistent! This is at the intersection of 50 km/h and 60 km/h main roads where there are multiple lanes in either direction (plus dedicated left- and right-turn lanes) and the average vehicle is going at about 80 km/h. Average! That means some are going faster! I’ve since gone through that intersection at 50 km/h, and I don’t feel safe doing so. But that’s OK, as long as I’m not going through it at the insane speed of 80 km/h, we’re all safer.
At this point, feel free to shake your head.
And how visible is that sign above? Definitely not very.
So what lessons have I learnt? It’s not to drive at exactly the speed limit, because I tried that years ago and, as with driving through this particular intersection at 50 km/h, I didn’t feel safe. No, what I do now is take routes in that area that avoid that intersection. Yup, I’m still driving as I always have, but just through different intersections. Somehow I don’t think that’s the goal of putting robots on the side of the road that see and measure everything, but that’s why I’m stupid and am not a police commissioner or the premier of the province.
I very strongly intended to fight the tickets in court, but eventually I decided, because the tickets were only monetary penalties to the owner of the car (my mother) and didn’t also come with the added sting of penalty points, I just paid them. Considering my business just failed and I have an income right now of $0.00, $342 was difficult, but that’s what credit cards are for. I’ll get back on my feet and pay back Visa eventually.
The intractability of ICBC
So what other excitement have I had with ICBC and the boys in blue? Well, as I said, I’ve been driving my mother around recently, and my 20/25-year (if not more) clean driving record was sullied. This was completely my fault (as some accidents are) when a driver in front of me suddenly hit the brakes for a surprise pedestrian and I rear-ended him. And how fast was I going? 250 km/h? No, I was barely moving, as even speeders are wont to do occasionally, because we were slowing down in a right-turn lane. I don’t know how fast we were going as it’s not my habit to glance at the speedometer as my vehicle is about to hit something, but I’d say we were barely moving. I did no damage to the other vehicle and all I have on my vehicle is an indentation on a bumper.
I reported the accident, as I’m required by law to do (I still follow most laws) to a call-taker at ICBC whose first language was obviously not English. If you want to hire foreign call-takers at your company and all you want to do is take orders for your widgets, that’s fine, but not if you’re taking statements in legal cases. So after my call I decided to log into ICBC and provide further information. This required that I re-activated my account with Service BC to integrate with my phone. I did that, and logged into my account and found that ICBC hadn’t connected my account to the “claim” (I’ll explain why that is in quotes in a moment) that I had opened. So here we are about a month after the accident, and I’ve had three (I think, Gmail is such a shit interface) messages from “CC63” at ICBC, who also seems to be challenged by English. I get between one- and four-sentence emails, but none of them make any attempt to resolve the situation in which ICBC has put me by denying me access to provide additional information about my accident. I can’t really think of anything else to say, but you can’t pretend to “resolve” an issue in one- to four-sentence emails, most of which are boilerplate. That’s just ridiculous.
(Why do I put “claim” in quotation marks? According to my education, one only makes a claim against an insurance policy if one claims a payment for something that that is covered by the insurance policy. The cars of both parties in the accident were not damaged and neither was either party injured [and there was no third-party damage], so there is no claim. But the non-English-speaking call-taker pointed out to me that by reporting the accident I had opened a “claim”, even though she heard me state that there was no claim under the English definition of the word. So either her English wasn’t very good, or she has been brainwashed by ICBC jargon to just believe everything they tell her.)
And I haven’t even got to the point where I can complain about the fact that the non-English-speaking call-taker actually said that ICBC will find out about anything to do with my driving, even if I try to hide it. First of all, WTF?! Second of all, I’m not trying to hide anything, and for someone to suggest I am — and it’s only a matter of time before Big Brother finds out — is beyond the pale unless you have evidence that I have tried to mislead someone.
I have an expletive ready to go here, and it’s one of George Carlin’s famous “seven dirty words”, but I receive complaints occasionally.
The hypocrisy of the police
We’ve all seen the police do things they’re not supposed to do, whether it’s right in front of you or on the news. It’s the stuff of legend. We write it off because there’s nothing we can do about it, because most of it is inconsequential anyway. But try telling a cop that the 80 km/h you were doing in a 60 zone was “inconsequential”, and he (or she) will laugh at you and write you a ticket anyway, because the government is expecting that revenue. I remember obeying the law recently and I was pulled over and “talked to” (I didn’t get a ticket, because I didn’t break any laws) because the cop made the assumption that I had no idea what I was doing, or that another driver would assume I had no idea what I was doing and would then act that way and hit me. It was the other driver that should have been pulled over and talked to (or even ticketed for failing to yield), because I didn’t break any laws of even rules. But I’ve had interactions with cops in unmarked vehicles where they were obviously breaking the law, but because they had red and blue flashing lights, they just flashed them at me and I quietly went about my business. I mention this now because this just happened to me on Monday.
I was driving along Steveston Highway in Richmond and I passed an unmarked (as I found out later) police vehicle, a black pick-up truck. And no, I wasn’t doing 250 km/h; I was probably doing what everyone else was doing, about 70 km/h … yes, in a 50 km/h zone, in the same lane as others doing the same speed. I have no idea if it was a Richmond RCMP officer because I never saw him or her in the flesh and got some reasonable identification. Before he (or she) revealed himself/herself to be a cop, I noticed that one of his/her headlights was out. Then he (or she) flashed his/her red-and-blues for no apparent reason (other than to intimidate me, I assume, as other off-duty Richmond RCMP officers have done in non-driving situations) and I got ready to pull over, but he/she carried on and didn’t do anything, and I continued driving as I was. However, if that cop had pulled me over, I was going to ask him/her to write themselves a ticket as well for having one headlight out. I have no idea how that would have gone, but it was worth a shot.
Back when I was doing my darnedest to be a law-abiding citizen and drive at or slower than the speed limit (referred to above), I was passed all the time by cops … in marked cars even! That’s one of the reasons I felt unsafe obeying the speed limit, because nobody else (including the cops!) was doing the same! Why should I drive at 50 km/h when I’m being passed by a cop doing 70?! Why should I do 50 km/h when I’ve got people rushing up my ass and pressuring me to go faster? Why should I do 50 when it’s obvious I’m the slowest person on the road and holding up traffic? So many rhetorical questions, so many hypocritical cops.
Driving mentality
I don’t have any deep analysis of the psychology of driving, but one thing I have noticed, as I avoid being hit by people doing their make-up, eating hamburgers, applying mascara, brushing their hair, talking on the phone, etc., is that driving is not the priority of many people. I mean, sure, they’re in the car because they want to get from A to B, but they’ve done it so much they don’t care, and if the kids in the back seat need a swat, they need a swat! You can’t put that off until later. (That would be sarcasm.) I’m not holding myself up as the model for good drivers to emulate but, besides cars, I have learned to pilot aeroplanes, and you don’t just jump in a plane in your driveway with a couple of screaming kids and your hairbrush, and away you go. Sure, it’s much simpler to “pilot” a car (and also easier to come into contact with other cars), but if people paid as much attention to driving as is required to pilot aeroplanes, our roads would be in much better shape.
When I drive, whether I’m going 8 km/h (5 mph) in a parking lot, 30 km/h in a school zone or 120 km/h along the Coquihalla Highway, I’m driving. I’m piloting a vehicle of a tonne or two, which would hurt if it ran into someone … to put it mildly. I’m not doing one of the activities I mentioned above, I’m focussed on driving. Preferably as smoothly as possible, whether I have passengers or not, because it’s just more pleasant that way. Sometimes I’m fiddling with climate controls or radios (which is one of the reasons touch screens in cars should be banned!) but only when it’s safe to do so, such as when I’m stopped or moving in predictable traffic, such as when I’m on the freeway. I don’t know, but controlling those things is never my priority.
Making suggestions
Isn’t this the point at which I, in all my wisdom, make recommendations? Look, we can’t all be experts on every facet of life, but it’s clear to me that “the powers that be” couldn’t give a shit about us becoming better drivers. They’re just after the money that citizens apparently have stashed … who knows where? … just waiting to pay fines. As our society evolves, we’ll find more and more ways to control the population by, as I say above, installing robots at the side of the road to record and measure our every move. Some people probably want that, and will work to get it; I don’t want that. But, as I watch the news tonight, I’m reminded of the fact that I can assault an innocent person with a baseball bat and be back on the streets tomorrow, but god help me if I do 80 km/h in a 60 zone, because there’s probably a camera somewhere recording that, and hooked up to a system that will automatically churn out a speeding ticket and mail it to me.
That doesn’t improve society.