Law enforcement across the province issued fewer tickets for distracted driving in February. SGI's Traffic Safety Spotlight was shone on distracted driving, for which harsher penalties were put in effect beginnign February 1st.

"In the first month after those much stiffer penalties took effect, police still managed to find 647 distracted drivers for the month of Feburary," said Tyler McMurchy, Media Relations Manager with SGI. "647 drivers received a very expensive reminder about the importance of paying attention to the safe operation of their motor vehicles."

"While we have seen numbers come down from the average of nearly 900 per month that police were reporting when distracted driving numbers were reaching their peak in 2019, we know that there are still people who are looking at their phones and being distracted in other ways," he noted.

"Even though the laws around distracted driving didn't change, the only things that changed were the costs of the tickets, when those penalties were even first announced in November, we saw lower numbers in November, and December, and in January, before the penalties even took effect, and we've seen that effect sustained for the month of February as well, which is a good thing," McMurchy said. "The nubmers were getting out of hand."

He said in October, we set a record for distracted driving offenses in the province, with nearly 1,300 in a single month.

"That's an all-time record as long as we've been doing these Traffic Safety Spotlights in five years, and I'm quite sure that there weren't ever more tickets issued before then, because police have increasingly over the past few years, focused on distracted driving," shared McMurchy.

Also in February, police issued 426 tickets related to seatbelts or car seats, 307 impaired driving offenses, and 574 tickets for speeding or aggressive driving.

Results are not quite yet in for March's focus on seatbelts and car seats; SGI's focus for April is on speeding and aggressive driving.