Sorry, Rob Ford: Pedestrian safety is important in Coquitlam
Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart speaks out after the Toronto mayor was ticketed for jaywalking
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford reportedly said ticketing jaywalkers is a waste of taxpayer dollars, but he found out first-hand that's not the sentiment in a Metro Vancouver city.
Ford, who is visiting the Vancouver area this weekend to attend a funeral, was handed a $109 fine for jaywalking near a Shell gas station, up the street from his hotel in Coquitlam Friday night.
The news was broadcast on social media, as were numerous photos and video of the mayor, who posed for photographs on the side of North Road and inside local pub The Foggy Dew.
Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart later wrote a Facebook post that the city had previously "asked Coquitlam RCMP to clamp down a bit on the serious and risky issue of jaywalking."
"Perhaps visitors from out-of-town might not be aware of that. Sorry, Mayor Ford," the post said.
Stewart told CBC News that jaywalking remains one of the major reasons pedestrians are getting hit and killed by cars on Coquitlam roads, and the city takes pedestrian safety seriously.
"We want to enforce our safe pedestrian activities across our community, no matter who you are. And in this instance it was a visiting mayor," he said.
"We've really spent a lot of time on engineering, on education, but also on enforcement. We're going to continue with that enforcement and all those other efforts to make it so that fewer people get injured and fewer people get killed crossing the street."
With files from the CBC's Luke Brocki and Richard Zussman