The province banned speed cameras but just announced it will spend $210 million on road safety
Make it make sense
The provincial government announced today that it will spend $210 million on road safety. That’s good, right? Speeding is a real problem and someone should address it. The investment will cover traffic-calming measures such as speed bumps, roundabouts and raised sidewalks, with more signage and heavier police enforcement in school and community zones. Wait a minute. Didn’t speed cameras already incentivize safer driving in Toronto by issuing $40 million in fines in 2024?
Indeed, a July study from SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University found that speed cameras reduce speeding by 45 per cent in school zones and other safety priority areas. It also found that speed cameras slow the majority of drivers’ maximum speed by more than 10 kilometres per hour.
Premier Doug Ford called speed cameras a “cash grab,” however, and banned them as of Friday. So we’re eliminating the thing that works, in order to spend a lot of money on…speed bumps. The math is not quite mathing for us, but what does everyone else think?
Related: No one hates speed cameras more than Doug Ford
As reported by CP24, today’s funding announcement comes alongside new poll results that show 50 per cent of its 2,000 Ontario-based respondents prefer less punitive measures. (How many of those were Ford’s cabinet ministers, we wonder.) Thirty-three per cent of respondents said they’d rather have speed cameras.
“We don’t want to see any children get hurt just because they’re trying to get to school,” Faraz Gholizadeh, co-chair of the advocacy group Safe Parkside told CBC.
“That’s what these speed cameras are there for. They’re there to keep our children safe. And unfortunately our premier feels differently about that.”
Let’s hope the driver doing 70 in a 40 km/h zone in a vehicle registered to a Ford staffer is slowed down by more signage.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
