SURREY — A Surrey man was issued a 13-month driving prohibition after his alleged bad driving became a special project for the RCMP Deas Island Traffic Service.

“Over the past year police agencies throughout the Lower Mainland received numerous complaints regarding the same white vehicle registered to an owner in Surrey,” Constable Melissa Wutke said. “The sheer number of complaints and the dangerous manner of driving described prompted members of Deas Island Traffic Services to initiate a covert enforcement operation to attempt to observe the manner in which this vehicle was being driven, first-hand.”

She said a Surrey man in his 30s, whose name she did not reveal, “is being charged with multiple traffic offences. As a result of numerous driving complaints from the public, the male was located by police and his vehicle impounded.”

Wutke said plainclothes and uniformed traffic offers watched the vehicle being driven from Surrey on Sept. 7 and “noted a large number of dangerous traffic violations. Police stopped the vehicle in Richmond, where the driver was issued numerous violation tickets, and had his vehicle impounded for excessive speed.”

Sergeant Lorne Lecker, detachment commander for the DITS, said that “from the sheer volume of the complaints and the nature of the driving involved, we had to go the extra mile to investigate these concerns before this vehicle caused a serious collision.

“If the public hadn’t brought this to our attention,” he said, “we may not have been aware of this risk, or had the successful results that we achieved.”

tom.zytaruk@ surreynowleader.com