OUR VIEW
Burnaby NOW
Summer is flying by and so are the vehicles on our roads, with a number of excessive speeding incidents taking place recently.
The drivers of four Porsches were caught going up to 131 kilometres per
hour in an 80-kilometre zone on the North Shore during the B.C. Day long weekend, according to the Vancouver Sun.
In Burnaby, a motorcyclist was caught by police in the underground parking lot of Metrotown at Metropolis on Aug. 9, after driving more than 150 km/h on Lougheed Highway.
These are extreme examples, but many of us drive just a little bit faster during the summer.
The arrival of September should be a reminder to all of us to take it slow, especially in local school zones.
With kids heading back to class in the coming weeks, most school zone speed limits will be 30 km/hour between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. While it may be tempting to let the speedometer creep up, this puts our most vulnerable citizens at risk.
And it isn't just those drivers passing local schools who need to be aware and cautious of their speed - parents dropping kids off do, as well.
Parents who make U-turns in school zones, stop in no-stopping zones, roll through stop signs, and ignore safety patrollers and signage set a bad example for their children, and endanger themselves and others.
Drivers who ignore traffic laws around schools can be heavily penal-ized for doing so.
The penalty for speeding in a school zone is three points on your drivers' licence, with a fine of $196 if the driver is going between 31 and 50 km/h, jumping to $253 for travel between 51 and 70 km/h.
But the financial costs are nothing compared with the guilt and horror of having inadvertently harmed or killed a child. So keep your eyes on the road and your foot off the gas in school zones this September - and we'll all be safer for it.
