Despite assurances from the province this month that it’s stepping up road-safety measures on major Northern routes, provincial police continue to spot and pull unsafe and “defective” heavy trucks off the roads.
On Saturday morning in the Nipigon area, an OPP officer patrolling on Highway 11-17 observed a transport truck with two wheels missing from its trailer, a provincial news release said.
A 59-year-old Winnipeg trucker was ticketed under Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act with driving a truck with separated wheels and driving a commercial vehicle without a required inspection, the news release said.
Later the same morning, police said, officers received a report of another transport travelling on Highway 11 near Beardmore with missing wheels and tires.
The truck was stopped and its driver, a 24-year-old Toronto-area resident, was ticketed for driving with parts and wheels separated or detached, failing to accurately complete an under-vehicle inspection report and operating an unsafe commercial vehicle, the news release said.
An inspection on the truck “revealed multiple defects, resulting in the removal of the vehicle’s (licence) plates,” police said.
None of the offences in both cases have been proven in court.
“The OPP investigates thousands of preventable CMV (commercial motor vehicle) collisions every year, making this a serious road safety issue,” the OPP news release said.
Last week, the province said it will increase the number of transportation enforcement officers working along Northern Ontario main routes, and deploy two “mobile inspection support units” this spring to improve safety along the region’s notorious Highway 11-17 corridor.
The measures, along with other pledges, include “improved” signage on the occasionally hair-raising Trans-Canada Highway route.
The province also said it plans to step up “enforcement blitzes along the Highway 11-17 corridor between truck inspection stations to ensure trucks are safe and drivers follow the rules of the road.”
It also said it would refurbish a truck inspection station in Hearst.
In the last two years, the province has come under fire from truck-safety advocates as well as opposition MPPs, including the NDP’s Lise Vaugeois (Thunder Bay-Superior North), for not increasing the operating hours of a new Highway 11-17 truck inspection station just east of Thunder Bay.
