Oceanside Community Safety

A number of readers contacted me after I told a story about a man walking behind me when I was preparing to back out of a parking stall. These readers all advised me that I should back into parking stalls rather than driving forward into them. The benefits of doing this outweigh the convenience of entering the stall nose first in all cases but one.

We continue to adapt to living and working with the COVID-19 pandemic and while we are doing a great job in adjusting to these new challenges, earthquakes, storms, forest fires and other natural disasters continue to occur.

We all need to be prepared and one of the ways is to practice how to be safe during an earthquake. The 2021 ShakeOut drill is set for October 21 at 10.21 am.

Whoosh! Here comes a car overtaking my police vehicle at 144 km/h in the posted 110 km/h zone. It's dark at 11:30 pm and at that speed, any animal or object on the road won't be identified in time and a collision is almost sure to occur.

One of my preferred enforcement practices was to use an unmarked car and drive in the right hand lane at or just under the speed limit. This gave me plenty of time to look at and into whatever passed by on my left. Vehicle defects, failing to wear a seatbelt, distracted driving and other things of interest to a traffic cop were often easily discovered.

The Shift into Winter campaign reminds B.C. drivers to be prepared and plan ahead for Mother Nature’s ultimate road test

Winter driving can more than double your risk of being in a motor vehicle crash in B.C. To help reduce the risk, the Shift into Winter campaign launched province-wide October 1 to remind drivers to be prepared and plan ahead.

My article on driving lights led to a number of requests to write a follow up article on fog lights. The original question involved vehicles that were driving with four lights on all the time and two of them were not being dimmed for oncoming traffic. Many readers were aware that the extra two lights were fog lights and not driving lights.

Oceanside Community Safety's Mike Garland speaks with The Lounge FM's Bill Dean discussing upcoming events.

During this time period the Oceanside RCMP received 301 complaints.