General Road and Highway Discussion

[Bob_McBob]

The answer is an average of 671.5 charges per year from 2019-2020, or fewer than 2 distracted driving tickets per day. Despite an uptick in speeding charges due to Covid downtime, distracted driving charges fell to an all-time low of only 637 in 2020. That's down from thousands when the law was first introduced. It's also my impression many of these charges are for stopped vehicles since it's convenient for WRPS officers to observe drivers, which is of course the least dangerous form of this behaviour. Apparently charges are up in 2021, but not much, and the annual total won't be known until August 2022.

Here are the updated speeding ticket numbers including the 2020 annual report. I don't have older numbers for distracted driving because WRPS won't provide more than 3 years of annual reports, but it's possible to dig it up like I did with the speeding numbers.

2015 - 13,509
2016 - 11,473
2017 - 11,714
2018 - 8,847
2019 - 7,250
2020 - 10,189