Traffic Safety Foundation: 10 Years Later

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BCAA’s Traffic Safety Foundation recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. We spoke to Executive Director Alan Lamb to see if the last ten years have lived up to his expectations.

Alan Lamb: Really exceeded them. Far, far exceeded them. Not anywhere near where I expected we would be. The fact that we’ve got a very well established and committed Board of Directors, that represent so many different walks of life. These are committed, dedicated, volunteer board members! That certainly is a highlight for me.

The other big one for me is the demonstrated,  and I’m going to underline demonstrated, support that we are receiving from BCAA for this work. They don’t just say it’s important, they actually demonstrate through their actions that this is important for BCAA to be so involved in road safety. That has certainly exceeded my expectation.

The fact that we now have WorkSafe BC as a primary funding partner with us in occupational road safety activities is a highlight; and something I didn’t think we would see for another couple of years. That’s certainly been a tremendous success, so we are charging away with a goal in mind to have the best workplace road safety strategy in the country; for workers in British Columbia.

Another highlight for us would be our reputation we now have nationally, if not internationally, on the continuum for  mature driver safety. So whether it be our volunteer, peer to peer workshop model through dementia and driving, which we are becoming quite expert at, right through to alternative forms of transportation. So we’ve got a very robust program for seniors and we’re very, very proud of that.

Our work with police officers, whether it be our training of police officers for child passenger safety work or just our strong working relationship with them, has been a wonderful thing and I really didn’t think we would be celebrating, but we are!

And finally, I guess the way we have been able to personalize so many of our programs, whether it be through our matching fund for child passenger safety seats, where we give a dollar and get a donation for a dollar and go out and buy safety seats for needy families, has been a real highlight in my career.

Also the Alexa Middelaer story. Making sure that people understand that when they drive impaired it’s not just about a number, or someone being injured or killed, it actually tears families apart and the Middleaer family in Delta is a good example of that. Their four year old daughter was killed by an impaired driver in May of 2008. So the whole personalization of this topic is something that has come much faster than I expected it would come in ten short years.

With all their success, Alan feels there are still some areas where they can improve.

Alan Lamb: We still struggle, as do road safety professionals right across North America, in having drivers understand that their attitudes and behaviors contribute to the fact that we have on average seven people killed every week in our province due to road crashes, which costs our society every year $8.8 billion. I really thought we would have come much further in convincing people – even, wonderful, good, professional people – that their aggressive driving is in fact causing traffic crashes. But again it’s not a problem that we in BC are just dealing with, I just was hoping that we would be able to be much more successful in doing that. But we still have two-thirds of all drivers thinking they are far superior drivers than anybody else and should be able to drive as they wish, and so we have a long, long way to go on that.