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Victoria, B.C.’s first year with Canada’s toughest roadside penalties for impaired driving saw alcohol-related motor vehicle deaths reduced by 40 per cent, Premier Christy Clark announced today, the National Day of Remembrance for Road Crash Victims in Canada.

In addition, the Province will contribute $40,000 this year toward establishing Alexa’s Bus, a mobile road safety bus that will focus on impaired driving education and enforcement.

“In honour of Alexa Middelaer, a four-year-old girl whose life was cut short by impaired driving, we set a goal to reduce impaired driving fatalities by 35 per cent by the end of 2013,” said Premier Clark. “Just one year later, preliminary data shows we are already exceeding that with a 40 per cent reduction. That’s 45 more families in B.C. who have been able to keep a loved one safe from impaired drivers.”

From Oct. 1, 2010, to Sept. 30, 2011, the total number of alcohol-related motor vehicle deaths across B.C. was 68. This represents a decrease of 40 per cent from the 113 such deaths on average in each of the previous five years.

“For the first time in a decade, we’ve seen a real drop in the deaths associated with impaired driving, and 45 more people made it home safe in the past year as a result,” said Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Shirley Bond. “Together with public education, prevention programs and criminal sanctions, the roadside penalties will continue to play a role in helping to ensure the success seen over the past year becomes a life-saving trend over the longer term.”

B.C. police agencies have backed up the deterrent and life-saving value of the new penalties with strong enforcement. Between Sept. 20, 2010, when the new sanctions came into effect, and Sept. 30, 2011:

· Police across B.C. report having served 23,366 immediate roadside prohibitions to drinking drivers.

- Of these, 15,401 were to drivers who blew in the “fail” range (i.e., with a blood alcohol content level of 0.08 per cent or over) or refused to provide a breath sample

- 7,965 were to drivers who blew in the “warn” range (i.e., provided a breath sample between 0.05 and 0.08 per cent).

· Police impounded 20,020 drinking-drivers’ vehicles at the roadside.

- In 14,951 cases, drivers received a 30-day impound for a “fail”.

- Of the other 5,069 impounds for a “warn”, 98 per cent were three-day impounds for drivers caught a first time under the new rules. (Vehicle impoundment is at the discretion of police on the first or second occasion that a driver blows in the “warn” range.)

“The B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police strongly supported the new law, and recognized that enforcement would be critical to help build awareness, change drinking and driving habits, reduce injuries and collisions, and ultimately, save lives,” said Chief Supt. Bill Dingwall, president of the association. “The first-year success is a reflection of a significant change in public attitude towards drinking and driving, with enforcement and immediate sanctions reinforcing this remarkable change.”

Alexa’s Bus, a vision of her parents Laurel and Michael, has quickly drawn contributions from an array of governments, organizations and private donors – including $50,000 from BCAA, $15,000 from MADD Canada, $40,000 from ICBC and $10,000 from the City of Surrey. Similar buses already exist in Alberta, Ontario and Washington State.

The Motor Vehicle Act changes that came into force Sept. 20, 2010, mean drivers impaired by alcohol face immediate penalties that may take away their vehicle, their licence, and cost them anywhere from $600 to about $4,060 in administrative penalties and remedial program costs.

For most conscientious drivers, the rules of the road are like divine commandments: to be followed unquestioningly, as if passed down for all time from Mount Sinai on a graven tablet. Because they’re meant to preserve our safety, most of us willingly submit to them, giving up the freedom to drive however we please in the interest of the common good. This is the social contract all drivers enter into freely when they get behind the wheel. But the authority of the rules of the road is also reinforced in all sorts of ways, from stern warnings, speeding tickets, aggrieved honks, and demerit points to an elaborate infrastructure of traffic lights, street signs, road markings, speed bumps, and other mechanisms of control that are essential to rationalizing the flow of traffic and preventing a descent into a chaotic state of nature. Or so the argument usually goes.

But for Hans Monderman, the late Dutch traffic engineer who pioneered the urban-planning concept known as “shared space,” the notion of the right of way as a categorical true-or-false proposition was about as rational as the divine right of kings. Monderman’s shared-space design philosophy is based on the principle that people who use the roads should rely on their own judgment to determine amongst themselves who has the right of way under the particular traffic conditions at any given moment. In this system, the regulatory powers to govern traffic are transferred from the state to the individual and the community at large. The people have to take responsibility for their decisions without simply trusting in traditional control mechanisms like lane markings and yield signs to do the work for them.

To the conventional, rule-bound way of thinking, this scenario might sound like a catastrophe in the making. But Monderman was no crypto-anarchist. He believed that the main problem with the prescribed rules of the road is that they prevent drivers from exercising their own discretion. By regulating what we can and cannot do, street signs, traffic lights, and road markings relieve us somewhat of the need to think and act independently, undermining our autonomy and so diminishing our sense of personal accountability. A driver who sees a red light when approaching an intersection slows down to stop not because he’s scanned his surroundings and determined that stopping is the safest, sanest, most socially responsible course of action; he stops primarily because the law requires him to, regardless of what’s happening around him. Yet drivers shouldn’t be taking their cues from traffic lights, Monderman argued; they should be watching and communicating with the other human beings they share the streets with.

According to Monderman, in a strict rules-of-the-road-based traffic regime, drivers behave more like Pavlovian dogs than independent critical thinkers who are engaged with their surroundings. “Who has the right of way?” he once challenged in an interview with the New York Times. “I don’t care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains.” He was referring to the Dutch town of Drachten, where virtually all traffic lights, street signs, and road markings have been abolished since 2003 in a shared-space design initiative that he spearheaded. The town previously had reported an average of eight traffic fatalities per year. Today, the average is: zero. Paradoxically, the more “dangerous” the roads seem to become, the more safely people tend to drive, which ultimately makes the roads a safer place for everyone.

This counterintuitive logic is actually in line with a well-documented psychological phenomenon. Just as people behave more cautiously in the face of perceived danger, so they also behave less cautiously when they feel safe. It’s called risk compensation, and it helps explain why, for instance, owners of vehicles with antilock brakes tend to drive faster, follow closer, and brake later than owners of vehicles without them, or why people drive closer when passing cyclists who are wearing helmets than when passing cyclists who are helmetless. If the perceived risk is lower, it turns out that it’s only human to behave more recklessly.

On this basis, Monderman argued that, by creating an impression of relative safety and structure, traffic lights and signs cause people to become complacent, less alert, and so more prone to the sort of lapses that cause accidents in the first place. As soon as their light turns green, many drivers roll into the intersection as if nothing in the world could touch them. But even when you’ve got the right of way on your side, it doesn’t mean other drivers are going to do right by you. Danger is virtually a constant when you’re in a moving vehicle, and the greatest danger of all is in complacency. Surprisingly, the very measures and mechanisms designed to ensure our safety, the stop signs, the school crossings, the antilock brakes, and all the expensive gadgetry hardwired into our dashboards and hailed by manufacturers as state of the art – all of it may actually be diluting our impression of the reality of the danger around us, numbing us to it by transforming it into something remote, abstract, improbable.

In the shared-space school of urban design, it’s not lights, signs, and markings that regulate traffic but the configuration of the streets and intersections themselves. The width of the roads, the grade of inclines, the sharpness of turns, the placement of sidewalks, curbs, and medians, even the use of fountains, trees, and other environmental features to create a psychological calming effect on drivers – in each case, the goal is not to establish an infrastructure of enforcement and control but rather to bend driver behaviour to road design. A good example is the roundabout. Not only do these largely self-regulated circular junctions reduce bottlenecks and ease congestion, studies have also shown them to be far safer than traditional four-way intersections, where tense, hesitant drivers often face off like gunslingers in a Mexican standoff.

Drachten is not the only town to experiment successfully with Monderman’s shared-space concept. Towns and cities in Australia, New Zealand, Germany (home of the speed-limitless Autobahn), the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and even the good old US of A have put the philosophy into practice to good effect, stripping city streets of traffic lights and removing lane divisions and curbs in order to create more communal, hospitable roads and cities. Of course, Monderman didn’t call for the complete elimination of control mechanisms. He acknowledged that such devices are necessary in areas with higher traffic density. But the core principle of shared-space design still holds: road architecture shapes not only the movement of traffic but also driver behaviour. Ultimately, if traffic rules are enforced like categorical imperatives, those who use the roads are apt to think less about whether their actions are safe, reasonable, or just than about whether their actions are merely legal.

Vancouver, BC - The arrival of the 2012 North American spec i-MiEV (Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle) was celebrated in Vancouver with Shin Fujioka, President and CEO of Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada Inc. (MMSCAN).

"Just over a year ago we celebrated the completion of the Clean Across Canada Tour in Vancouver with our Japanese i-MiEV and today we celebrate the arrival of our first 77 North American i-MiEV's to Canadian soil," states Mr.Fujioka. "We have been working closely with several partners across Canada over the past year and know our EV technology is ready for the Canadian urban commuters."

Mitsubishi celebrates its commitment to the company's test fleet partnership with several provincial, municipal, fleet and corporate partners across Canada.  With over 43 i-MiEV's on the road across Canada we are proud of our commitments with the following partners: Hydro Quebec, BC Hydro, City of Vancouver, Town of Qualicum Beach, District of Saanich, ENMAX, Government of Manitoba, Transport Canada, City of Toronto, City of Montreal, Eaton, Right to Play, Club Assist and Autoshare.  

"We have gained valuable information about our batteries and charging systems", said Fujioka, "and we have a better idea of how well the i-MiEV will integrate with the electric grid.  All of this information is valuable as we launch the i-MiEV into the Canadian market."

The Mitsubishi i-MiEV represents the height of Mitsubishi Motors' green technologies, and our Canadian partnerships is the largest of its kind in North America.  

The i-MiEV will be available to Canadians at Mitsubishi dealerships over the following weeks.

The 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV (Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle) is a five-door, 4-passenger, subcompact hatchback that has been designed and packaged to be efficient, ecological and fun to drive.  It will be the most affordable, mass-produced, all-electric vehicle in the Canadian marketplace, and with a range of up to 155 kilometers, and a top speed of 130 km/h,the  i-MiEV will make an excellent commuter vehicle for many Canadians living in urban areas. Thanks to its excellent fuel efficiency rated as 112 MPGe(2.1Le/100km), i-MiEV has scored first-place honors of Fuel Economy Leaders: 2012 Model Year by the EPA annual Fuel Economy Guide in the US.

The fully equipped i-MiEV will be available in two trim levels, the standard i-MiEV will have a Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $32,998.00 and the top of the line i-MiEV with the Premium Package will have a MSRP of $35,998.00.

With a MSRP of $32,998 a full $ 5,397 less than electric vehicles produced by other mainstream automobile manufacturers. The provinces of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia have already announced subsidies towards the purchase of electric vehicles (a credit for the i-MiEV is $8,231 in Ontario, $7,769 expected in Quebec and $5,000 in British Columbia). Therefore, the net MSRP of the i-MiEV in these three provinces will be $24,767 in Ontario, $25,229 in Quebec (expected) and $27,998 in British Columbia.  Furthermore, Quebec will also offer a 50 percent subsidy on the purchase and installation of a home charger, up to a maximum of $1,000 and British Columbia will offer a rebate of up $500.00 on the purchase of an EVSE (Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment) system. The revolutionary Mitsubishi i-MiEV is the most affordably-priced mass-produced electric vehicle available in Canada.

And thanks to its eye-catching design that makes for a surprisingly roomy cabin and excellent handling, stability and safety accompanied by the additional benefit of exceptionally low maintenance and refueling costs the all-new Mitsubishi i-MiEV is an outstanding choice for the eco-conscious automotive consumer searching for a primary vehicle to supplement their use of ride sharing and/or public transportation, or as an ideal secondary vehicle for those wanting to make a meaningful personal contribution to sustainable transportation.

No matter what the destination or the vehicle that gets you there, there’s something almost mythic about the idea of the road trip. It seems like a kind of latter-day expression of the Spirit of the West, that quintessentially American impulse to break with custom and tradition and strike out for the frontier in search of new experiences. Of course, the open road can be a desolate place, lonely and maddeningly dull, but freeways aren’t freeways simply because there are no tolls. For me, the appeal of the road trip lies in its close association with a romantic ideal of freedom, maybe not the grand, capital-F variety (as in freedom from tyranny), but freedom from the problems, worries, and disappointments that can be like a permanent feature of our familiar environments. The road trip seems to promise that, by escaping our surroundings, we might also escape the rest of our lives, at least for a little while, until they catch up with us in Memphis, Chicago, Vancouver, or wherever else “the road takes us.” Which when you think about it is an apt way to describe the drawing power of the open road: we don’t take it the same way we take the car to the office or the kids to school, but it takes us, pulling us into its circuitry as if by some natural or vital force.

The enduring cultural fascination with the road trip has led to countless road-trip movies, which are as close as some of us will ever get to the experience. A lot of movies have what you might call road-trip elements – the difficult but fulfilling journey, the faithful vintage car, the travellers who by the end of it all come to learn important “life lessons,” etc. – but they’re not what you’d consider bona fide road-trip movies, which are practically a genre of their own. With a Hollywood adaptation of Kerouac’s On the Road due to roll into theatres next year, now seems like a good time to revisit a few of the classics. The movies listed below, ranked in no particular order, may not be the first that come to mind when you think of road-trip classics, but they’ve helped shape both the genre and – rightly or wrongly – what we’ve come to expect of the road-trip experience itself.

Rain Man (1988)
Rain Man doesn’t show up on many classic-road-trip-movie lists: estranged fathers and sons and idiot card-counting savants don’t seem like the conventional stock-in-trade of the genre. But there’s no doubt Rain Man belongs. The entire movie revolves around a beautiful 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible, complete with trademark VentiPorts and bucktoothed grille, that drives a father and son apart after a fateful joyride, only to reunite that son with his autistic brother after their father dies. As it turns out, the autistic brother (Dustin Hoffman) insists on being driven cross country when his younger brother (Tom Cruise) abducts him and tries to fly him back to the West Coast. What follows is a classic road trip full of beautiful twilight skylines, neurotic bickering, and seedy motels, culminating in one of the greatest Las Vegas sequences of all time.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
As the title suggests, the trip at the centre of Planes, Trains & Automobiles isn’t limited to the road, though many of the movie’s most memorable scenes take place in or around the charred ruins of a 1986 Chrysler Lebaron Town and Country (hardly a thing of beauty under the best of circumstances, despite its uptown name). Most road-trip movies involve a breaking-away from the constraints of home, an escape from the monotonous rhythms and routines that make up the better part of our days; PT&A is concerned less with new frontiers than with the difficulty of the return journey. The movie’s comic tension is largely a result of the enclosed nature of the car, whose confines make for a compelling stage, especially when occupied by talented actors playing characters who want nothing to do with each other. Steve Martin is a tightly wound advertising exec desperate to get home to his family in time for Thanksgiving who finds himself blockaded inside a cheap rental with an obnoxious shower-curtain-ring salesman (John Candy). Without a doubt, one of the funniest (and most unexpectedly poignant) movies of its decade, and a true road-trip classic by any reckoning.

Midnight Run (1988)
For one reason or another, 1987-88 was a banner year for the road-trip genre. As with almost every movie on this list, the transnational road trip in Midnight Run derives a lot of its dramatic interest from the conflicting natures of the road-trippers, a grizzled bounty hunter (Robert De Niro) and his prisoner, a crooked but conscientious accountant and inveterate complainer (Charles Grodin) who is a marked man and wanted fugitive after embezzling millions of dollars from the mob. One of the great virtues of the road-trip movie is that the events of the plot are usually compressed into just a few days, which tends to create a natural unity and, in this case, a frantic headlong pace: De Niro has to race to get Grodin back to his bondsman alive and well while staying clear of the FBI, mob hitmen, and a rival bounty hunter.

About Schmidt (2002)
Of course, not all road-trip movies are fast moving. Take About Schmidt. To file it under the road-trip genre is almost to diminish its dramatic power. While the plot is framed around a retired accountant’s long trip from Nebraska to Colorado in a mammoth Winnebago Adventurer, it’s mainly a study of its central character, the titular Schmidt, played with unusual restraint and pathos by Jack Nicholson. A recent widower, Schmidt sets out to reconcile with his estranged daughter in the hope of justifying his largely uneventful existence. In the vastly overrated Easy Rider, Nicholson rode cross country as a young hell-raiser in search of altered states; here he’s a defeated ghost of a man desperate to rescue some shred of meaning from the debris of his life. It may be bleak, but it remains true to the abiding spirit of the road trip, which is not just about accumulating new experiences but also about reflecting on times past.

Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
The road-trip movie shares a common border with the buddy movie, and often crosses over into the same terrain. Motorcycle Diaries is a case in point. It dramatizes the four-month, 8,000 km road trip from Buenos Aires into the Peruvian Amazon that a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara, future guerilla and revolutionary martyr, embarked on in 1952 with his best friend on a squat, low-riding Norton Model 18. Their ultimate destination was a leper colony in Peru, where they worked with the sick and conducted research (Guevara was trained as a physician), but en route they visit seaside towns, rural villages, and Incan ruins in a journey that sheds interesting light on Guevara’s character before he became a T-shirt icon.

Into the Wild (2007)
Like Motorcycle Diaries, Into the Wild chronicles a real-life road trip: the trans-American journey of young Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless, memorably played by Emile Hirsch. After graduating college, McCandless shed his old life, turning his back on his self-destructive family and heading for Alaska in an effort “to kill the false being within” and find some kind of elemental truth in a return to nature. The journey is transformative, even though it ultimately costs McCandless dearly. If you’ve never been on a road trip before, this may be the best available substitute.

Broken Flowers (2005)
Broken Flowers may be the most interesting road-trip movie you’ve never seen. It came and went quietly on its theatrical release, but, like virtually all Jim Jarmusch films, has since acquired a fanatically devout cult following. In it, Bill Murray plays a wealthy one-time Lothario on the wrong side of fifty who one day receives an anonymous letter from an old flame informing him that years ago she bore him a son. At the insistence of his neighbour, Murray grudgingly sets out to track down the mother and meet his son. Like any good road trip, Broken Flowers is unpredictable and full of wrong turns; no matter how many times you watch it, you’ll never feel altogether sure what’s around the next corner.