People who drives cars or trucks for personal use get a lot of crap for the problems they cause.
Some of the criticism is warranted, of course.
One area that regular folks don’t get enough credit for is keeping their vehicles in good condition.
Compared with commercial vehicles, I would bet most people keep their ride pretty tip-top.
I say this after seeing some tweets by the Burnaby RCMP. Earlier this week, local police were out checking commercial vehicles “ensuring that commercial drivers are complying with regulations.”
Let’s just say that a lot of commercial drivers and their parent companies were not following the regulations.
Burnaby RCMP reported that when it came to safety and mechanical checks, quite a few commercial trucks failed the test.
Out of a total of 530 commercial vehicles inspected, a whopping 207 violations were identified.
That’s a lot and it’s really scary because we’re talking about large trucks on the road during some of the busiest times of the day in Burnaby.
These numbers fall in line with what other communities have found.
In October 2018 in New Westminster, 314 vehicles were inspected by police and other agencies, and more than half had deficiencies that had to be repaired right away. Only 23 vehicles passed inspection without any issues, while 122 required minor repairs.
Think of that – just 23 out of 314 had no deficiencies.
This is ridiculous. We need to be doing more than just fining commercial drivers. Take away their vehicle for a while and we’ll see if these drivers and their bosses who are trying to save a few bucks on maintenance start keeping them in a safe condition.
