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The B.C. government is immediately lowering speed limits on 15 of the 33 highway sections in which speeds were increased by 10 kilometres an hour by the previous Liberal government.

This after a review of three years of police and ICBC data showed an overall increase in serious accidents involving injuries and fatalities on roads for which the former government implemented speed hikes in 2014.

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The safety evaluation showed serious collisions increased 11.2 per cent overall on road segments where the speed limit was changed.

There were 63 collisions involving fatalities on the affected highways in the three years before the 2014 speed-limit changes. And in the three years after they went into effect, there were 88 fatal collisions. (The report doesn’t detail how many individuals were injured or killed, only the number of collisions involving injuries and deaths.)

Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Claire Trevena said that while driver inattention is the most common factor in crashes, higher speed limits are now proven to be correlated with serious crashes: “I think that any crash on any highway is one too many, and the fact that we’ve seen these increases in serious collisions where speed limits were raised is reason enough to be rolling them back.”