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this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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That high of a percentage of drivers exceeding the limit doesn’t demonstrate the need for speed cameras, but rather a gross failure of road design and traffic engineering.
Enforcement should come after traffic calming and pedestrianization efforts have failed. North American cities are notoriously bad at that.
All I see is a study that shows places where the posted limit should be increased. If there are concerns about pedestrians then safer crossings, pedestrian education, or road redesigns should be the focus.
I don't understand the constant push toward reducing the speed of road traffic and I say this as somebody who has been a pedestrian and a driver for several decades.
I mostly agree, where it's reasonable. In places with a large presence of pedestrians, I don't exactly, except for on road design. The roads should come up and meet pedestrian level, not pedestrians going to street level, for example. This requires that cars go slower. It isn't an issue of pedestrian education though. Pedestrians shouldn't need education. The design should just work to protect them.
But yeah, usually cars "speeding" consistently is a sign speed limits need increased. Lower speed limits increase the difference in speeds of cars, some going the limit and some going the speed they're comfortable with (the speed fo traffic). This delta causes accidents, and the larger the delta the worse the accident. If people are always speeding, the limit needs to match them.
I think it really depends. Often times the roads existed before the people. If they wanted to live near a 50-80km roadway, that's their choice.
I'm so tired of watching speed limits creep down and people continually crying about speeding when the issue is attentiveness and awareness.
IMO people not signaling intent and running trains through yellow/red lights to make left turns are FAR more dangerous than people going 15-20 km over the limit down straight highways with little traffic. Oh, and people who camp in the passing labe and force people to undertake to get around them.
As for pedestrians, it's people standing on the curb and crossing streets with their heads down on their phones and headphones on. What happened to the rule of crossing as quickly and safely as possible, and paying attention all around your as your cross?
We should also be putting fault in vehicle manufacturers who continue to produce complex touchscreen-based infotainment systems.
Speed cameras ARE traffic engineering, and here is the evidence that they work. They are not the only tool available, but to act like they weren't doing anything about traffic engineering is a bizarre take.
Um, but even with that, the stark difference in the data also shows that the cameras were an effective means of traffic calming.
Ford forced municipalities onto speed cameras in place of the road design changes that they were doing.
Traffic calming and pedestrianization efforts have failed.
You're getting downvoted, but it's true. Ford has also passed laws making changes to existing roads more difficult.
Yup. I think it's the difference between looking at how things actually are and what they could be. We all know that better road design and pedestrian streets are the gold standard solution. Implementing any of those doesn't happen in vaccuum. We need the political organization needed to enable them. We don't have it. We don't even have the plausibility of having it. The small bits we've managed to do on municipal basis are getting reversed. So in reality those initiatives have failed to decrease vehicle speeds. The fact that it's because we can't actually implement enough of them, for people of Ontario, .. I consider immaterial in the current context. If we were in an emvironment where it was actually plausible we could implement calming and pedestrianization changes and we were debating those as opposed to speed cams, then that would matter greatly. In the Ontario reality we live in, with Ford leading us for 8 years and counting, with the NDP at 20%, I think it's useful to consider those efforts as failed and fight for whatever measures are plausible and achieve the speed decrease we want in order to save pedestrians lives and injuries. And the graph here shows traffic cams did indeed work, all else being equal.