Car Winter

January's traffic safety spotlight resulted in close to 400 tickets issued for intersection-related offences across the province.

Saskatchewan police issued a total of 383 tickets, including 220 tickets for disobeying traffic lights, 95 tickets for failing to stop at a stop sign, 65 tickets for failing to yield to the right of way, and 3 tickets for failing to yield to a pedestrian.

Communications Consultant, Marie Schultz, says last January, there were 800 tickets issued for the same spotlight.

"We have seen an improvement since last year, but these numbers are still really high. Intersections are very dangerous, 40% of collision that happen in Saskatchewan are at intersections, so that equates to about 30,000 collisions at intersections in Saskatchewan," she said. "It's still quite a high number, we still want people to pay extra attention as they're approaching them, look for oncoming vehicles or people running a red light, increase your following distance especially if the roads are slippery, and just pay a little bit more attention to your surroundings."

Schultz adds SGI's Twitter campaign '#wecandrivebetter', has resulted in a positive response from most of the public.

"Some people are actually sending us thanks on Twitter and Facebook, just thanks for this awareness because I was able to prevent an accident due to the tips that you are putting out there, and although there are still tickets happening, I think behaviour is changing, but we've got a long way to go."

In addition, there were 806 offences for speeding, 211 offences for distracted driving, 90 impaired driving-related offences, and 425 occupant restraint violations.