Prince George, B.C. – If you’ve ever wondered what the RCMP are thinking with a roadblock here, or two cruisers just a few kilometres apart on the highway, just ask Staff-Sergeant Pat McTiernan…

The head of the Prince George Regional-Provincial Traffic Services Unit will tell you that he and his officers are trying to save lives. Plain and simple.

And, if the following local examples from this holiday season are any indication, we don’t make their jobs easy.

Take Christmas Eve: the Staff-Sergeant put every available unit out on area highways and told his officers to do their jobs to ensure people made it to their destinations safely. "I said, ‘I want red and blue lights on the highway, I want you stopping cars – it’s still your decision whether you write the ticket or not, but at the end of the day, we’re out here to save lives.’"

One vehicle stopped was travelling 172-kilometres per hour. The driver was handed a $468 ticket, had his truck impounded for seven days, and all of his Christmas presents transferred to a taxi. An hour-and-a-half later, another vehicle was stopped for driving 155km/hr at Bear Lake. That driver faced the same fate.

McTiernan makes no apologies for what appears to be a cold-hearted approach. "People say, ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’ But you know what – he’s going to kill somebody else when he loses control."

"At the end of the day, I wrote 18 (tickets) myself and I think only two of them were under 130 kilometres per hour." Three of his stops along Highway 16-East were Prince George residents hurrying home to wrap presents from West Edmonton Mall. "They said, ‘I’m just trying to get home, officer.’ I said to them, ‘Are you going to make it?’"

Traffic Services employed the same strategy – blanketing area highways on December 26th and 27th – and the Staff-Sergeant says motorists were all back to travelling within posted speed limits. "There was a difference in stress levels, people have slowed down.  So those are the dynamics we’re dealing with when we’re planning our strategies," he says. "No one wants a situation like the one that just occurred (Thursday) near Quesnel with the double fatality. It’s very traumatic for all involved – our officers, other emergency responders, and, of course, the families."

Thursday’s fatal crash also brings up another case in-point for McTiernan. Two units with Traffic Services decided to drive south from the city to try and control the situation as Highway 97 was about to re-open after the hours-long closure at the accident scene. "My officer said the situation was ridiculous – drivers were jockeying for position at 130- to 135 km/hr in the four-lane section of the highway near Woodpecker," says McTiernan. It was so bad, the officer couldn’t pick any one driver, so just pulled over and put his lights on in an effort to slow everyone down. The second officer was further north at the Red Rock scales and encountered the same situation.

"At some point, somebody’s going to make a mistake when they’re travelling at that speed," says McTiernan, "And we’re going to have to move the whole investigative team up the highway (from the fatal crash near Ahbau Creek)."

"As it was, there was another crash that happened after the fatality, but it wasn’t an injury crash. Some guy wasn’t paying attention and he came in too fast and bounced off a logging truck, but he’s okay." But the head of Traffic Services says, "It goes back to – how do you prevent anything else from happening?" Those two officers did write a number of tickets.

McTiernan says members of his unit are constantly assessing what they’re dealing with out there on the roads, and adapting their strategies accordingly.  Social media has added a new wrinkle to their efforts – with tweets and posts about roadcheck locations. McTiernan says RCMP have countered this holiday season by moving the stationary roadblocks more frequently and by employing rolling roadchecks – where, for example, four police cruisers may pull onto a road and pull over the first four cars, re-group, and move to a new street to start again. Some preliminary results from this season’s counterattack are expected later this morning.

Regardless of the strategy employed, the goal for McTiernan and his officers is simple: to keep people alive.

And if that means writing speeding tickets on Christmas Eve, McTiernan will do it. "I’d rather have my people do the paperwork on the tickets, than the paperwork on a fatal accident."