Grant Gottgetreu, Former traffic cop in New West and West Vancouver, now a forensic criminal and traffic consultant at Forensictrafficpro.com discusses whether or not traffic could have still been allowed to move across the Alex Fraser Bridge during a crisis situation earlier this week.
“In a situation like this – I’m going to assume you’ve had to deal with some of these, what is the priority of the police? How do they go about getting control of the situation?”
“…One of the things we discusses years ago was portable screens to block off the incident so that traffic could still flow and people couldn’t see what was going on because it’s a dynamic situation. You have to both deal with the person in distress, but also consider the traffic issues that are being created. Unfortunately, what was described with people shouting and yelling and encouraging the person to do something silly is not entirely unusual… In this particular case, there had to be some sort of way to deal with all the traffic that was backed up stuck. It’s unreasonable to expect people to sit stuck for 3, 4, 5 hours. You have to deal with them. They have to be turned around. They have to be rerouted. Something has to be done because blood is going to boil at the end of the day…”