A 17-year-old West Vancouver longboarder is in intensive care after sustaining critical head injuries in a collision with a passenger van driven by a friend Friday evening.
Three 17-year-old Rockridge secondary students were boarding near the 6900-block of Isleview Road, a curving dead end hill just north of Whytecliff Park at about 6 p.m. when the collision occurred.
The two other boarders stayed at the scene while emergency crews arrived and rushed the injured teen to hospital. Both Rockridge secondary students are co-operating fully while police investigate the cause of the crash.
Longboarding is prohibited in the District of West Vancouver and boarders are subject to $45 fines. West Vancouver police have received 67 complaints about longboarding so far this year.
"The bylaw prohibition exists because there are clearly known risks associated with being on a longboard on a public roadway. Those risks exist whether you know who's operating the other vehicle or not," said West Vancouver Police Department Const. Jeff Palmer.
"There are already known and well-defined risks any time you're in a roadway . . . if you're the smallest and least protected moving vehicle on that roadway, the risks rise dramatically.
"Our focus right now is, as with the family, is on the wellbeing of this young guy," Palmer said.
Counsellors have been sent to Rockridge to help the boarder's fellow students deal with the trauma raised by the incident.
Police have ruled out alcohol as a factor in the crash, but could not say whether or not the injured boarder was wearing a helmet.
"Longboarding protective equipment is essentially, as I understand it, designed to protect you from a fall," Palmer said. "Its limitations would, I suspect, be reached in a collision with a vehicle."
The crash could have been avoided by longboarding in a controlled environment, according to Les Robertson, marketing manager for Rayne Longboards.
"There was a sanctioned event over the weekend in Britannia Beach where they could have ridden for two days," he said, adding that medics were on hand and boarders were not required to race at the event.
As a proponent of community outreach and education to help make the burgeoning sport safer, Robertson said the collision underlines the difficulty in bringing North Shore longboarders into a cohesive community.
"We're doing outreach as best we can as a brand and going to events and engaging longboarders but the problem still persists . . . a longboarder that we can reach and talk to, is generally not the issue. It's the fringe areas," he said.
"It's especially the ones that are younger or just getting into longboarding that we haven't been able to reach with our community and to help teach."
The sport has been under close scrutiny since 2010, when longboarder Glenna Evans died after colliding with a van on Mount Seymour Road.
The District of North Vancouver dealt with a rising tide of opposition to the sport by raising fines and banning longboarders from Skyline Drive, known as one of the district's boarding hot spots.
