According to Staff Sgt. Paul Stacey, crashes in Calgary have been steadily declining over the past three years.
Stacey told Global Calgary there were a total of 35,000 collisions in the city in 2016, which is down from 40,000 in 2013.
He believes the Calgary Police Service’s (CPS) approach to focus on overall safety has played a role in this.
“There is no one silver bullet for all of this. There’s a whole bunch of factors.”
Stacey said police have taken a safer systems approach, working with the city and province to improve signage and road design, as well as increasing enforcement and education efforts.
Since fall of 2016, the CPS has been hosting town halls in different wards around Calgary to talk about traffic concerns.
Stacey said while there may be fewer vehicles on the road because of the slower economy, there is still a lot of traffic.
“We have a lot of drivers, a lot of vehicles, they’re still doing a lot of driving.”
According to Stacey, there were one million vehicles registered in Calgary in 2016, and 900,000 licensed drivers.
He said the city has 52 traffic cameras set up, and in 2015, they recorded 145 million trips through the city.
Stacey believes that by and large, the drivers in Calgary are being safe, with less than one per cent of drivers being issued traffic violations.
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