A Comment by Doug Draper
I was driving south on Highway 406 a week or so before this past Christmas when it began snowing so hard it was getting kind of’ treacherous out there. You could hardly see the road in front of your face.
So I did what few other drivers seem to do any more during one of the first heavy snow falls of winter. I slowed down.
Guess I was the stupid one though because other drivers kept whipping by me as if it was a sunny day in July, including one cowboy in a light truck that splashed grimy slush across my windshield as he sped by. Every once in a while there is a bit of poetic justice though, and a few miles up the road I passed this same ranger with his truck spun off through a ditch and about 40 feet off the road.
This brings me to the suggestion some have that the answer to all this is making those of us who already spend a ridiculous amount of money keeping a vehicle on the road spend many hundreds of dollars more putting snow tires on our trucks and cars.
I’ve got an idea that might even prevent more road accidents in winter. Why not just slow down!
I live on a regional road in Niagara, Ontario that is a feeder street for a cornucopia of dead-worm roads and cul-de-sacs disengorging from low-density suburbs nearby, and I am continuously blown away by how fast people continue to drive down our road, even in a snow storm, to get to the shopping mall or some dead-beat job that probably pays them twelve bucks an hour out of fear that their dead-beat boss will reprimand them.
Then you turn on the radio and you have the obligatory warnings repeated every year at this time by local police and the Ontario and New York State police “cautioning” drivers to adjust their driving habits to winter road conditions. But many don’t and the next thing you read and hear about is about of the fender benders and worse around the first icy days of winter. And of course all of us who pay car insurance get stuck with higher premiums to pay for all of this whether we adjusted our driving habits or not.
What the hell is wrong with us as a species? We pride ourselves in being the most intelligent beings on the earth but we seem to have the memory of a fly when it comes to winter driving. Or are you really under that much pressure from your boss or others to get to where you have to go, even if it means causing a hazard for yourself and others on the road?
Now some parties feel the need to encourage possibly even make and us us (as has Quebec with its drivers) fork out even more money that we hardly have for snow tires. The Canadian Automobile Association and Ontario Safety League have recently approach Ontario’s government to offer drivers a $25-per-tire tax credit to buy snow tires, which is a spit in a lake when the cost of snow tires is taken into account. And you can count on this eventually leading to a law requiring every driver in the province to purchase snow tires.
At least on this one, Ontario’s premier Dalton McGuinty is saying no. And what he and the CAA and Ontario Safety League should be working on with insurance companies across the province is taking drivers off the road who have rack up a record of hazardous driving during the winter months.
It might also be helpful by the CAA and Ontario Safety League to remind all too many of its members that obviously need reminding to simply slow down!
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