The commuters on a bus in the suburbs north of Toronto made sideways glances toward the back, where a uniformed police officer was sitting quietly, peering out the window.
“Oh my God,” Annie Sambolec thought when she saw him. “They’re looking for somebody.”
But the officer, York Regional Police Sgt. Mark Van Wolde, announced to the puzzled passengers that everything was fine — police were just trying out a new way to catch people texting and driving.
As the bus headed down Yonge Street, from Newmarket, Ont. toward Richmond Hill on a Wednesday morning earlier this month, Sgt. Van Wolde could see inside passing cars from his high perch at a window seat. At a stop light, Van Wolde looked into a white minivan in the adjacent lane and saw the driver typing on her phone, unaware she was being watched.
“OK, fellas,” Van Wolde said over his radio to the four unmarked police cruisers hovering around the bus like wasps, waiting for orders. “White dodge minivan, female driver … operating a handheld device in her left hand.”
Van Wolde jotted down notes on what he saw — the type of phone, the colour of the protective case — to assist if the ticket is challenged in court.
The York Region officers rode the bus 21 times since July, for a total of 39 hours, as part of a distracted driving project cribbed from other North America police forces, including London, Ont.
In four months, the bus project in York has led to 107 distracted driving tickets. And York Police brass aren’t keeping the operation secret. They plan on rolling out advertisements on the outside of buses, warning passing drivers that a cop could be watching them from inside — effectively turning every bus into a police cruiser.
On the morning Sgt. Van Wolde spent two hours riding the Yonge Street bus, his team handed out two tickets — $490 each, with three demerit points. The white minivan wasn’t one of them.
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It had a Toronto Maple Leafs sticker on the licence plate, Van Wolde told his team, as one of the cruisers set off to pull it over.
“Do you still have eyes on it?” one of the officers radioed to Van Wolde, minutes later. “Looking for the Leafs sticker. I never saw it,” another voice said over the radio.
Van Wolde had lost sight of the minivan as well. The driver had likely turned onto a side street, with no idea that she had just dodged a $490 ticket with three demerit points.