The Ontario Provincial Police have issued a stern warning aimed at speeding drivers, after two Ontario men were stopped hours apart for allegedly going over 200 kilometres an hour.
OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt tweeted that a 19-year-old man from Oakville, Ont., was caught speeding at 254 km/h on Highway 403, just west of Toronto, on Thursday night.
Another driver, a 20-year-old man from Whitby, Ont., was clocked going 227 km/h just hours before, Schmidt says.
In an interview with CTV News Channel Friday, Schmidt says “unfortunately it’s not that uncommon” for officers to apprehend drivers going at high speeds. Officers in the Greater Toronto Area alone “take six drivers off the road every single day because of street racing,” he says.
“These are street racing stunt drivers going well in excess of 150 km/h or racing with one another. Four hundred and fifty drivers have been taken off the road already this year…and that’s just here in the GTA.”
Schmidt says that aggressive driving doesn’t always mean going at excessive speeds but also “weaving through traffic.”
“Even at 100 km/h weaving through traffic dangerously…can still result in devastating injuries,” he says.
Of the 450 drivers taken off the road so far this year, more than 200 of them were males between the ages of 18 and 25, Schmidt said. The next most dominant demographic were “males between the ages of 25 to 35” – but Schmidt says they’re not the only ones.
“We are seeing men and women of all ages from 16, 17 who barely have their full licence... up to 50 plus,” he says.
Schmidt says the OPP “are not just focusing on the penalties… the real factor is that people are losing their lives in collisions because of aggressive driving.”
