230 km/h and only traffic tickets? What gives?

Kyla Lee

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230 km/h and only traffic tickets? What gives?

Kyla Lee<br>Jul 25, 2026

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On July 14, a BC Highway Patrol unit near Fairmont Hot Springs clocked an Audi doing 230 km/h in an 80 km/h zone on Highway 93/95. That is nearly three times the limit. The car was moving so fast the officers decided they could not safely pull it over, as to do so would be a violation of the pursuit policy. So they let it go.<br>Officers then drove to where they suspected the vehicle was heading. Campers pointed them to a nearby campsite, where they found the Audi parked and empty. They then tracked down the driver, a 20-year-old from Alberta. After interactign with him, police suspected he had been drinking, and asked him to blow into a roadside screening device. He registered a “warn.”<br>For all of that, he was not charged with a single criminal offence. He received a three-day driving prohibition, a ticket for excessive speeding, a ticket for driving without a licence, a seven-day impound, totalling $959 in fines, all under the Motor Vehicle Act. BC Highway Patrol called it “persistent police work” that “held a driver accountable for his dangerous driving behaviour.”<br>Sure. But at those speeds and with alcohol possibly on board — is that really the best they could do?<br>Probably.<br>Driving at 230 km/h is, on its face, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle under section 320.13 of the Criminal Code. The problem is proving who was driving.<br>A criminal conviction requires the Crown to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person charged was in fact the person who was behind the wheel. Here the police never stopped the car while it was moving. They saw a speeding Audi, lost sight of it, and later found it parked and unoccupied. Between the radar reading and the moment they found a man at the campground, there is a gap in continuity. The evidence connecting him specifically to the reprehensible driving is thin.<br>In fact, it seems unlikely they will be able to prove even for the traffic ticket he was driving. I would be willing to bet they are banking on him not disputing it.<br>There is no automatic conclusion that just because someone was driving later they were also driving earlier. The defence does not have to prove that someone else was driving. It only has to raise a reasonable doubt that this man was. An empty car and an inference are not the same thing as an officer who watched the driver the entire way.<br>The police found the car because “helpful members of the public” told them where it went. In mid-July, next to a hot springs resort, those members of the public are almost certainly vacationing campers, and they are almost certainly from somewhere else.<br>A tip that helps officers find a car in the moment is a very different thing from a witness who will drive back to the Columbia Valley months later to testify at a trial. If they skip the traffic court trial, that’s one thing. But as many of these people most likely live out of province, that means money and resources to bring them back to a small community to give evidence should the matter go to trial. Some will remember very little by the time a trial date arrives. A case that depends on tourists returning to court is a fragile case, and the Crown knows it.<br>Even willing witnesses may not help.<br>Set aside whether the witnesses come back. Ask what they actually saw. A car travelling at 230 km/h is a blur. The people who reported it may have seen a fast Audi and a direction of travel. Certainly very few of them got a clear, reliable look at the driver’s face.<br>Eyewitness identification is one of the least reliable forms of evidence in criminal law. It accounts for a large share of wrongful convictions later overturned in Canada. Courts treat it with real caution for exactly that reason. “I think that was him” from someone who glimpsed a speeding car is not the foundation of a sound conviction.<br>The alcohol reading also proves less than it looks like on its face. A “warn” on a roadside screening device tells you there was some alcohol in the driver’s system when he blew. It does not tell you how much was in his system while he was driving, and here that distinction carries more weight than usual.<br>The results of a proof screening device test are not admissible to prove anything in criminal court. If the police wanted proof in a criminal trial that this person had alcohol in their body, they would have needed to make a demand for breath samples and take the individual back to the police station. Not only would that take hours of police work and resources in a community likely short on them, but any demand for breath samples based on a worn reading would be on shaky grounds. This in turn means any samples obtained would probably be excluded after a successful Charter challenge.<br>By the time the officers found him, the driver had parked, left the Audi, and spent some unknown stretch of time in a campground. A person...