Driver who hit pedestrian charged with attempted murder

On Saturday, when I sadly noted that killing a person with a car nets you a $1500 fine, I also was pleased that the RCMP seemed to take the recent hit and run in Port Alberni seriously enough to consider it attempted murder. Today we learn that the driver, one Daniel Marc Akerley of Port Alberni, was charged of attempted murder.

While it is nice to see charges of attempted murder in this case, it was a pretty hideous crime. It seems there was personal bad blood between the victim and Mr. Akerley and he chased the victim down, missed him once and then when he finally hit him, drove over him a second time. This is not your usual hit and run. It is pretty clear you need to have motive in order to get charged if you hurt or kill somebody with a car.

So if we are not going to charge these drivers, we should at least be building our streets to slow them down, so that when they do hit somebody and get away with it, there is less likelyhood that they will kill somebody. After all, the chance of a pedestrian getting killed drops from 45% to 5% when the speed of the car drops from 50 km/h to 30 km/h.