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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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The chickens are coming home to roost
Wha? They banned speed cameras?
It's better than that.
Ford has been in power since 2018. In his first two years, his admin advocated for and pushed through legislation specifically to allow speed cameras to be installed in municipalities. This may have been leftover legislative planning from the previous party, but in either case it rode through with conservative favour.
Political interests have since shifted, and with his most recent term as Premier, he's been loudly admonishing any municipality that installs speed cameras, bike lanes or other traffic calming measures because he's parroting nonsense about how it restricts traffic in high density areas and is making a stink about how it all just increases congestion.
It's dangerous, stupid and frustrating. He's made threats to municipalities thay don't agree with his declarations, attempting to deny typical grants allocated to improving infrastructure in smaller regions.
To be fair, there are problems with speed cameras that we've seen in the US, so probably similar problems exist in Canada. For example, they're often outsourced to private companies, and there are privacy and accuracy concerns. Local governments with access to speed cameras can make a lot of money from speed traps, and so they have a financial incentive to make the road harder to drive on, when they should be making roads easier to drive on. People sometimes see speed cameras and slam their brakes, which can cause all sorts of problems.
Usually, the better way to control speed is to design your roads to naturally be a certain speed. Some ways you can do this is by controlling the width of the lanes, the length of the lines in the lane dividers, and the curve of the road.
Speed cameras also unfairly penalize gig workers who are driving all day and driving on unfamiliar streets all the time. The fines imposed for speeding are flat, not based on income, so they disproportionately affect lower income people of all sorts.
OH WELL.
This is a life-saving intervention that is empirically proven to save lives. The lives of pedestrians are more important than the income of gig workers. Pedestrians are an even more disadvantaged and vulnerable class than gig drivers.
It's a tiny problem, we can accept that it is a bit regressive and adjust taxes elsewhere to compensate. For this, I should die? Sort it out, bud.
What the actual fuck. Lower income people can't read a speedometer? This is such a Lemmy man bun and Birkenstock comment.
If the punishment is a static fine it's only illegal for the poor.
The point isn't to punish people, it's to keep people un-killed. If speed cameras don't work on 2% because they are wealthy sociopaths, that's not a reason to abandon the intervention that has been clearly proven to work at the intended purpose of keeping people from getting killed. This is such a bizarre objection. Perhaps it is a reflex earned from decades of looking for how the poor get screwed and that's admirable but it kind of looks like looking for any excuse not to have to slow down.
Do you have evidence that speed cameras with fines are clearly proven to "keep people from getting killed" because I'm pretty sure their primary purpose is revenue generation.
Edit: looking into it, it seems the majority of the available data generally indicates a reduction in collisions and fatalities but apparently the methodology across the various studies has been pretty inconsistent so there's no hard numbers. But apparently they range from no reduction at all to 70 percent from my glancing at the data, apparently how many cameras how far apart and how far from the high traffic incident area are the main determining factors in reducing accidents. I may have overlooked it but I didn't actually see anywhere that shows the speed reduction after camera introduction though.
What are you even doing in this community? Go watch Not Just Bikes for a few hours before you post here again.
When speed cameras were first introduced they led to an uptick in accidents because people would brake suddenly when they saw the camera and get rear ended. This still happens but thought out implementation seems to result in a net reduction in collisions but more data is needed. All this is to say the primary purpose of speed cameras is still revenue generation.
It’s not the speedometer that you need to watch for, it’s the speed limit signs by the street. Many of them are blocked by trees or around corners, and they change the speed limit suddenly and without warning.
This is what it means to be a speed trap. Locals know about it because they live there. Gig workers do not.
Karens complained they were money grabs.
oh you read this thread too, eh