A spectre is haunting Canadian roads: the real prospect of actually having to pay a fine for not respecting the speed limit. As speed cameras proliferate, particularly in Ontario, some drivers are showing their displeasure. Many of the cameras have been vandalized and one in Toronto cut down six times.
It’s time for a deep breath.
Speed cameras shouldn’t disappear, they should multiply. The cameras are effective and, because their penalty is so easily avoided, they are fair.
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In fact, a recent poll for CAA showed majority support among Ontarians for the cameras. Politicians who pander to the minority of drivers who hate them are gambling with public safety.
Those politicians span the ideological spectrum, from Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford to former Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca, now mayor of suburban Vaughan, and left-leaning Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow.
So busy trying to placate drivers, these politicians ignore that speed cameras work. The hit in the wallet is sufficiently unpleasant that it convinces people to slow down. For evidence, consider that the number of tickets issued by any given camera typically goes down over time.
That effect has been further demonstrated by research from a hospital and university in Toronto. According to their findings, referenced in a recent city staff report, the proportion of vehicles speeding went down 45 per cent after cameras were installed near schools and in high-collision areas.
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A person hit by a vehicle travelling at 30 kilometres an hour has a 90-per-cent chance of surviving. Increase the speed to 40 kilometres an hour, though, and the survival rate drops to 60 per cent. A person hit at 50 kilometres an hour has only a 20-per-cent chance of living.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-sorry-speed-cameras-arent-the-problem/
They eliminated speed traps in Calgary Alberta fairly recently. The police service is in economic distress because of it. Loss of revenue per year 28 million.
I'm all for reducing speeds but these cameras are well known to be used to fund police departments with massive swat teams, public policing issues, military assault vehicles, automatic weapons and now things like facial recognition software and interception of communications. Is this really what we want as citizens, to become more authoritarian and funded by money grabs until we have a dictator like those to the south of us?
https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/provinces-photo-radar-purge-leaves-calgary-police-with-28m-shortfall-taxes-may-need-to-rise-warns-councillor
If the fines were directly proportional to income and net worth, I would have absolutely no problem re-instituting those speed traps.
But if it’s a flat rate… any fine that that is a fixed number is meant to punish the working class for the crime of being poor.
And the wealthy will just see it as the cost of having fun, and pay the fine with the spare change they normally forget about in the bottom of their pockets. They’ll just continue doing what they’re doing because fines fail to impact them in any meaningful manner.
The revenues should have never gone to the police in the first place, they should go into redesigning and rebuilding problematic stroads so the cameras become unnecessary over time while other new permanent features of the road like speedbumps, curves, narrowing, and other traffic calming changes will enforce the speed limits passively.
Part of the problem is that roadway rule enforcement is seen as the police's problem and the police's budget, which is probably why they were getting the revenue from the cameras in the first place.
The portion of police budgets that goes to traffic control, responding to accidents, doing radar, and issuing tickets should be considered part of the roadway budget. How we design, fund, maintain roadways and their alternatives directly impacts the funding needed to enforce roadway rules and respond to roadway accidents. It doesn't seem fair for speed enforcement not to be considered while designing the road then just dump that problem onto the police budget.
Excellent point. There are so many critical errors in how our society operates. It gets overwhelming sometimes with how far necessary reform reaches into things we all take for granted.