Motorcycle Seized One Week After Deadly Sea to Sky Crash

Have risky driving habits become "daily standard"?

Motorcycle towed after speeding on Sea to Sky. Photo courtesy BC RCMP.

One week after a deadly crash that killed a motorcyclist and blocked the Sea to Sky highway for eight hours, another young driver has had her motorcycle impounded after being caught driving 97 kilometres over the speed limit near Furry Creek.

Police identified the driver as a 22-year old Vancouver woman in possession only of a Class 7 (passenger vehicle learner) and Class 8 (motorcycle learner) licence.

“Sometimes we feel like a broken record when we say that speed kills people,” says Corporal Michael McLaughlin with BC Highway Patrol. “But clearly some people aren’t getting the message. Being 97 kilometres per hour over the limit could easily have repeated a tragedy from only one week ago on the same highway.”

Last week's fatal accident came after a Highway Patrol officer flagged two motorcycles speeding and driving erratically as they travelled southbound on the Sea to Sky around 5:30 p.m. on July 5. Instead of stopping, the motorcycles continued along the highway, and a short time later one of them collided with a recreational vehicle near Deeks Creek. BC Air Ambulance attended but the motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene.

BC Independent Investigations Office was called in because of the police involvement before the crash. The aftermath of the accident left travellers stranded along the highway, which was closed in both directions for more than eight hours.

Lions Bay resident Leslie Nolin took three stranded travellers in overnight, and found space for a fourth at a neighbour's home. "We just connected with people who were stranded on the Sea to Sky Road Conditions page on Facebook," Nolin said. "They came and camped in our backyard, which was a step up from sleeping in their vehicles."

Nolin has offered to help stranded motorists via this same social media page before, most notably during the Battani Creek landslide that resulted in the deaths of David and Barbara Enns and blocked the highway in December, 2024.

Matthew Paugh manages the Sea to Sky Road Conditions page, and has become an advocate for change along the highway. Like Nolin and other local residents, he also took in stranded travellers after last week's accident. "I had two sets of strangers sleeping in my apartment that night: one in our living room and one in our spare bedroom," he said.

He also was able to house a truck driver, who slept on an office futon his company purchased specifically with this kind of an incident in mind.

Paugh has been driving the Sea to Sky for 19 years, and has been managing the Facebook page for the last several. The site has become a trusted source for many who drive the Sea to Sky corridor, and is often the quickest source of information when traffic is stalled. Over the years, Paugh has lobbied long and hard for changes that would allow for fewer slowdowns or total stoppages, as occurred last week.

In a piece he wrote for the Squamish Reporter in April, Paugh cited many actions that could be taken, "from more frequent and more detailed updates, new road lines, new road lighting, automated speed enforcement, on-demand turnaround gates to allow road services to more quickly detour folks, tire checks in West Vancouver AND Alice Lake, blasting out and widening Porteau Cove and Murrin, and a myriad of others."

Paugh is currently compiling a survey on local drivers' thoughts and concerns about disruptions along the Sea to Sky. He says a number of changes could be implemented on the highway at little cost, but that would require direction from the Ministry of Transportation.

"They could allow police and emergency services the leeway to turn traffic back at designated U-turns earlier in an incident so that congestion doesn’t build up at the incident scene, as well as a policy that sees an emergency vehicle, cruising up and down the closed lanes to keep them open, ideally with a loudspeaker that would direct people to the sides of the road rather than being parked in the middle of the lanes, blocking off emergency response vehicles."

Residents along the corridor continue to call for change to curb speeding and reduce the number of highway shutdowns. In a recent letter to the Minister of Transportation and local politicians, Lions Bay resident Ekkehard Goetting noted that current police resources are stretched to the limit, and the occasional police speed checks have little long-standing impact.

"The horrific statistics and the speed clocked over the limit clearly show that excessive speed is not a singular occurrence on a long weekend. It has become the daily standard of driver behaviour."

Residents interested in adding their thoughts to Paugh's survey can do so HERE.

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