The number of bumps, crashes and collisions climbed in St. Albert last year as both injury and non-injury accidents rose.
The numbers were presented to city council this week as part of the city’s year-end report.
There were 150 injury accidents in city limits last year, up from 114 in 2008, but down from the recent high of 176 the city saw in 2007.
Accidents where only bumpers, headlights and pride were hurt also rose as non-injury accidents went to 1,683 in 2009 from 1,532.
St. Albert RCMP Insp. Warren Dosko said the numbers are fairly susceptible to the weather and a couple of bad storms can skew them upwards in a given year.
“When the weather changes the margin of safety is greatly diminished and that kind of catches people off guard,” he said. “In the wintertime your errors are magnified.”
Statistics show in the first three months of last year the city saw 526 non-injury accidents and 43 injury accidents, compared to 450 non-injury accidents in 2008 and 19 injury accidents that year.
In July, August and September there were 321 non-injury and 31 injury accidents in 2009, more in line with the 323 non-injury and 36 injury accidents in 2008.
Dosko doesn’t give the motoring public a pass however and said bad weather simply makes bad driving worse.
“There is a whole bunch of people who are driving in those same conditions who don’t have accidents,” he said. “Even with bad driving conditions, most people drive perfectly fine.”
One area where the detachment has seen an increase Dosko said. is distracted driving. Cellphones are certainly a major part of that, but they are not the only culprits, he said.
“It is those other things as well. It is not just the cellphones. There is lots of multitasking going on,” he said. “It is becoming almost a norm that you multitask when you drive in traffic.”
There was only one fatality in 2009, a 34-year-old woman was killed when her vehicle rolled over following a crash on Ray Gibbon Drive. The death was the first on city roads in nearly two years and the first ever on Ray Gibbon Drive.
Dosko said the detachment is working with the city to monitor that road closely. He said it has a higher speed than most roads with a similar construction.
“That is going to be a road that we are going to have to monitor closely and see if the speed makes sense.”
He said officers would be continuing their enforcement and education efforts to reduce the risk. He said the detachment is also using speed-on-green cameras and special road counters to determine exactly where the most troublesome areas are and at what times.
“We are trying to work a little bit smarter as opposed to just going out and writing a lot of speeding tickets.”
