As a 37-year veteran of the Guelph Police Service and head of its Traffic Unit, acting Sgt. Dan Mosey has seen more than his share of collisions between vehicles and bicycles.
It is hoped new technology aimed at educating the public and enforcing new Highway Traffic Act rules about cars passing cyclists will help reduce the number of those collisions in the future.
The technology is a sonar device the size of a paperback book that attaches to the handlebars of a police bicycle. It measures the distance between the bike and vehicles passing it.
Guelph Police and the University of Guelph Campus Community Police will be using one in the near future.
New legislation introduced last January requires vehicles passing bicycles to give at least
Police demonstrated a borrowed device on
Mosey said it’s about education, not enforcement, at least initially.
“We prefer not to take people’s money, we prefer to have a safer community. I’m getting a little tired of investigating collisions when people are injured,” Mosey said.
The device is manufactured in
“The first part is an educational component of the new rules,” Mosey said. “To go out and hit people hard with fines doesn’t accomplish what we want to do. We need to educate people.”
The other part, Mosey said, is teaching cyclists to be responsible and staying “as close to the curb as possible.”
“There’s got to be enough room there so the vehicles can pull over,” Mosey said of the “give-and-take” component of road safety.
“We’re trying to change the conversation between motorists and cyclists, to work together,” he said. “The goal is always voluntary compliance.
Eventually it would be used for enforcement.
Police in
Mosey said so far Guelph Police haven’t laid any charges under the new law other than when a cyclist was struck by a vehicle. The measurement device makes enforcement easier.
“We haven’t had something that would measure that metre,” he said.
Guelph Police Sgt. Doug Pflug added that there is a grace period with new rules and hopefully the people will be educated.
“If we were to go out there and just hammer people with tickets right off the bat it always comes back to ‘well I didn’t know, I didn’t know,’ so this is another proactive attempt by us to educate people and tell them what the rules are,” Pflug said.
A more “punitive” stance will be taken down the road, he said.
Mosey said the device could be particularly useful on streets such as
He said even if a road is narrow the driver has to wait to pass the bicycle until they can offer that safe passing buffer.