Police collar drivers (again!) for unsafe loads
This is starting to sound like a broken record
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In what is surely our 8,295th paean about the perils of driving with an unsecured or unsafe cargo in the back of a pickup truck, Peel Police have again shared images of vehicles they’ve ticketed for having insecure loads.
Posted to the force’s Road Safety Services account on Twitter, we find a Ram 1500 and Honda Ridgeline in various states of undress; the former with unbound lumber sticking way too far past its rear bumper, and the latter with an array of materials which make the driver appear as if they are running away from home. Both were dinged with a $160 ticket under Section 111(2) of the Highway Traffic Act.
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The driver of the black Ram pickup truck deployed a method often used by people carting long items home from the lumber yard, which is to say they maneuvered the works of it through the truck’s sliding rear window. What they didn’t do, however, was tie a red flag onto the end of that material which was protruding out further than the truck’s back bumper. This is a universal rule intended to alert other drivers on the road and hopefully prevent them from being skewered by those items. Also appearing to be missing in this particular equation? Any sort of effort to tie down the materials.
And, no — simply having a passenger hang on to the lumber that’s inside the cab of your truck isn’t good enough. Physics will win the day in the event of sudden acceleration or unexpected turn, spilling the material onto the ground faster than a stoolie spills their guts under cross-examination.
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In the other unsafe corner we find a Honda Ridgeline filled to the brim with off-cuts of scrap wood, some of which appears to still contain scary looking nails. It’s all bad enough for a bystander or other vehicle to be hit by flying debris; it’s quite another matter if that debris is studded with sharp and spiky bits. The large black trash bags simply add to the chaos.
Sadly, this likely won’t be the last time we exhort drivers to not rely on gravity to secure the cargo they load aboard a vehicle.
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