File photo (Image credit: CFJC Today).

By Sydney Chisholm

highway safety

Number of highway fatalities down from last year: BC Highway Patrol

Aug 6, 2024 | 12:30 PM

KAMLOOPS — Over the last five years, the number of highway fatalities in the province has gone down every year.

According to BC Highway Patrol, in the first seven months of 2023, 176 people died in highway crashes. In the same period this year, that number is down to 140.

“The good news is that Highway 5 has also seen a significant decrease in fatal collisions since last year with highway improvements and BC Highway Patrol targeting impaired drivers and high-risk drivers,” Cpl. Melissa Jongema from BC Highway Patrol says. “The fatality rate for Kamloops to Blue River is significantly down.”

Jongema says eight people died on the stretch of Highway 5 from Kamloops to Blue River in 2023. And while 2024 isn’t over, there has been one fatality here since January.

BC Highway Patrol credits the downturn to ongoing initiatives targeting commercial vehicles and unsafe drivers.

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“We’ve had CVSE and BC Highway Patrol doing joint force operations to look at the safety of the trucks and the logs of the drivers. We’ve taken trucks off the road as well, targeted excessive speeders,” she said. “In one town, we had over 40 [unsafe drivers] taken off the road in just in a seven-day period.”

According to a report from BC Coroners Service, more than a third of all highway fatalities over the last 10 years happened in the Interior Health region, with the majority of crashes happening in the summer.