Seven heavy trucks were taken off a busy Burnaby roadway yesterday because they had less than 50 per cent braking capacity.
Burnaby RCMP and other Lower Mainland officers who are trained to inspect commercial vehicles were set up on Kensington Avenue between Joe Sakic Way and Lougheed Highway.
Const. Kevin Connolly, Burnaby RCMP's commercial vehicle specialist, describes that stretch of Kensington as “very concerning.”
It cuts through the Burnaby Lake Sport Complex, with the Christine Sinclair Community Centre and numerous sports fields on one side and the Copeland Sport Centre, C.G. Brown Memorial Pool and even more fields on the other.
It's a place where pedestrians, cyclists and commuter traffic can be found alongside all manner of trucks, according to Connolly.
“You have the large 53-foot tractor trailers, you have the landscapers, you have cement trucks, you have tanker trucks with dangerous goods all coming through there,” he said.
And more than half of those checked yesterday were taken out of service for safety violations, according to Connolly.
Between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., officers inspected 41 vehicles and found 29 were unfit to be on the road.
That included seven trucks with air brakes functioning at less than 50 per cent.
The officers handed out a total of 36 tickets.
Commercial vehicle enforcements in Burnaby routinely end in more than half the trucks checked being taken off the road.
That wasn’t lost on one Twitter user this week.
“You folks post this same tweet every 2-3 months; more than half of commercial vehicles on the roads are unsafe. Any idea when we might actually do something about it?” asked @CashGordon in response to yesterday’s RCMP tweet about the enforcement.
Burnaby RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Mike Kalanj said unsafe trucks are a complex and regional problem, and the local detachment is doing its part.
“We are doing something about it every time we do one of these inspections,” he told the NOW.
Follow Cornelia Naylor on Twitter @CorNaylor
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