By Tim Schewe
In the past, if you were curious to find out about the traffic tickets issued by B.C. law enforcement officers you could either read a PDF document published by ICBC or make a request for specific information from their stored data. The trouble was, sometimes those information requests took a significant period of time to fill and you had to know how to manipulate the information once you had received it.
Easy access to ticket data online
ICBC now publishes a data set for traffic tickets written by police and other law enforcement agencies in B.C. using Tableau Public. This free platform allows you to create visualizations of the data yourself or use a collection of parameters and filters to sort and narrow the search in order to find only what you need or are curious about.
Where to start
Your visit to the data starts on the Contraventions Into Page.
A collection of choices in the form of links in gray rectangles appears across the top of the page along with the terms of the open data licence.
The logical place to start is at the far right with the explanation of how to use the interface.
The contraventions data set
If you would like to jump right in instead, click on the Contraventions Data Set.
You will be presented with complete data for the full years preceeding the current one. Data for the current year appears to end about six months prior to the time of your visit.
There are 14 segments available:
• Commercial Vehicles
• Cyclists
• Driving Without Due Care
• Electronic Device Use
• Flight From Police
• Graduated Licensing Program (GLP)
• Impaired Driving
• Intersections
• Motorcyclists
• Occupant Restraints
• Other Criminal Code
• Other Motor Vehicle Act
• Other Motor Vehicle Act Regulations
• Speeding
Clicking on one of these segment links will show the total of related contraventions for that year.
Seeing just the data you want
In the blue rectangles for each year is a link that will present all categories along with a dozen filters in a column on the right side of the page. Picking and applying filters to the data removes everything that you do not want to see.
There is the odd error to be found in the data as 2020 saw a contravention by a pedestrian in Kelowna for Speed Against Highway Sign!
Saving your work
Once you have isolated the data, icons in the upper right of the page allow you to download or share it with others. Email, Twitter and Facebook options may be chosen.
Intersection safety camera data
Traffic camera charges are listed elsewhere. There is a summary page that lists totals for the program and a data catalogue that allows you to download camera statistics by location in a spreadsheet file.
Tim Schewe is a retired constable with many years of traffic law enforcement. To comment or learn more, please visit DriveSmartBC.ca