It is disturbing to learn about a 17-year-old youth in our city being so foolhardy as to be driving 105 kilometres an hour in a school zone.
And it becomes completely disheartening to find out the day after the near kamikaze speed run, another youth is caught doing 89 kms in a school zone.
The situation brings to mind so many questions, all of them which leave you scratching your head about the seeming lack of good answers.
To start there is the nagging question why people have so little regard for the safety of others.
A vehicle can easily become a weapon of carnage when mishandled, and while there are unavoidable accidents due to ice, rain, fog and other factors beyond our control, far too many accidents and injuries come as a result of plain stupid decisions made by drivers.
Why people still get behind the wheel of a vehicle after drinking, or push on the gas pedal to achieve speeds like the ones noted above in a school zone are beyond understanding.
That in this case it was teens, which means students themselves, would put the lives of fellow students at such risk is also beyond simple comprehension.
And while the speeding in this case demands harsh fines and should include license suspension, it should also include some review by trained personnel to understand why these youth took such risks.
And the risks cannot be underplayed here.
While in both cases accidents were not the result, one miscue could have turned the vehicles into out-of-control missiles, with carnage and death an all too likely result.
We also end up asking ourselves what can be done to better educate drivers not to take such ridiculous risks?
Frankly the answer is not much. Driver education, and ad campaigns already exist to reinforce safe driving habits, and simple common sense should be enough to tell any of us that a 100 km speed on any city street is beyond simply dangerous.
Which brings us to enforcement.
The two drivers above were caught in an RCMP crackdown targeted at speed enforcement is school zones, but unfortunately police can't always be on-site at every school zone in our city.
A reasonable solution in terms of enforcement is to move to photo radar. The province moved to legislate photo radar use in construction zones this year, and other jurisdictions use them extensively.
To have such technology in place in school zones is a case of using what is available to ensure student safety. That should make it an easy decision to move in that direction.
Whatever the mix of response is to the high speed driving through school zones is, it has to put student safety first.
And ultimately the rest of us need to learn from the incident, and make sure we keep the foot off the gas and obey the 40 km speed limit in our city school zones.
