With winter now in the rearview mirror, the roads are drying up and the temptation to floor it grows increasingly more common.
Saskatchewan Government Insurance and the Saskatoon Police Service urge drivers not to give into temptation.
“Certain people are travelling at really egregious dangerous rates of speed,” said Tyler McMurchy, media relations manager for SGI.
This past season local police nabbed a couple of speedsters travelling between 60 and 100 kilometres per hour over the speed limit.
“These are speeds that do not belong on public roads, they belong in a videogame or on a sanctioned racetrack,” he said.
In response to the uptick of speeders expected, SGI and SPS decided to have a little fun at the arcade, going head-to-head in a racing videogame, while reminding the public to reserve their urges to burn rubber to the virtual world.
For McMurchy and Sgt. Paul Pitzel, taking drift turns is much more fun in a videogame than in real life.
“Speeding is consistently one of the leading causes of injury and death on Saskatchewan roads,” McMurchy said. “Typically on an average year you see more than 20 people lose their lives in speed-related collisions and more than 600 people injured.”
In February Saskatoon police clocked a vehicle going 212 km/h on Circle Drive. That lapse in judgement cost the driver $1,602 and an impounded vehicle.
Last week Regina Police Service nailed a driver driving 61 km/h over the speed limit. The driver received a $809 fine.
“You see those speed limit signs and those speed limit signs are not a suggestion, they are the law and that is the maximum speed you should be driving under ideal road conditions,” McMurchy said.
In February city police in tandem with SGI targeted seatbelt and child safety seat infractions. Over the 28 days police wrote 344 tickets for failing to wear a seatbelt and 15 tickets for driving with a child not in the appropriate child restraint.
“The idea that people are still not wearing their seatbelts in 2019, more than 40 years since the adoption of seatbelt laws in Saskatchewan, it’s a bit mind-boggling as well,” McMurchy said.
