Unlike a speed camera, a police officer has some discretion when pulling over speeders and generally uses some common sense. Let’s say a group of vehicles is travelling 65 kilometres an hour in a 60 zone. The common sense reaction would be to let them go and pull over the car that’s going a lot faster and zipping in and out of traffic. But a speed camera doesn’t have common sense and will trigger a ticket based on a set speed. So what is the standard set point? It’s easy to say that if you don’t speed, you won’t get a ticket – but in practice, isn’t keeping up with the general speed of traffic both more practical and safer? – Ralph, Edmonton
When it comes to photo radar, cities won’t give you a trigger warning.
“[We] don’t disclose thresholds that trigger speeding violations to help prevent the impression [that there’s] an acceptable level of speeding,” Jessica Lamarre, director of safe mobility at the City of Edmonton, said in an e-mail. “Drivers remain responsible to drive the posted speed limit at all times.”
We checked with a few cities that use speed cameras and none of them would tell us the minimum speed over the limit that will result in a ticket. We also couldn’t find it published in any municipal or provincial guidelines for photo radar.
But, Edmonton records from 2014 show that just over 13 per cent of tickets that year were for speeding six to 10 kilometres an hour over the limit and none were issued for drivers going five kilometres an hour or less, Karim El-Basyouny, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Alberta, said in an e-mail.
In 2023, out of more than 135,400 photo radar tickets issued in Edmonton, more than 22,250 of them were for going more than 21 kilometres an hour over the limit on city roads. Also, more than 25,300 tickets were issued in playground zones.
So what was the average speed over the limit on photo radar tickets that cities handed out last year?
Only Toronto gave us an answer: 15 kilometres an hour over the limit.
Also, the top speed that Toronto cameras recorded last year was 188 kilometres an hour in a 50 zone.
Because there’s no set fine for any speed greater than 50 kilometres an hour over the limit in Ontario, the owner of that vehicle got a summons to appear in court, a Toronto spokeswoman said.
Fish in a barrel?
While police officers hand regular speeding tickets to the driver, photo enforcement tickets are sent in the mail to the car’s registered owner.
Because they can’t prove the owner was driving, the tickets don’t come with demerit points, they don’t end up on your driving record and they don’t affect insurance rates.
El-Basyouny shared two dozen studies showing the effectiveness of photo radar – including a study he did in Edmonton – and said there were even more. While results vary by the types of cameras and where they are, the studies show photo radar reduces speeding by 20 to 60 per cent and reduces crashes causing serious and fatal injuries by 10 to 40 per cent.
Also, photo radar reduces extreme speeding – going 40 kilometres an hour or more above the limit – by 66 to 90 per cent.
A recent study by Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and Toronto Metropolitan University found that speed cameras in Toronto, where Ontario law limits them to school zones and community safety zones, reduced the number of speeders in school zones by 45 per cent.
But some critics call photo radar a cash grab – an easy revenue generator for cities – because it tickets all speeders going over a certain limit and not just the worst offenders.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has called for cameras to be removed in Toronto after several were vandalized there.
Alberta has been culling photo radar locations since 2019, when, just before a provincial election, the then-NDP government banned photo radar on multilane highways unless there was proof of safety concerns.
Last year, the United Conservative government put a freeze on adding new photo radar locations and banned photo radar on ring roads in Edmonton and Calgary, where speed limits are 100 kilometres an hour.
Since April, Alberta has banned photo radar anywhere except school, playground and construction zones. That included stopping cities from using existing speed cameras in intersections.
But it will be allowing Camrose, a city 90 kilometres southeast of Edmonton, and Calgary to reactivate cameras at a few intersections where collisions have increased in the months since the ban.
In Camrose, for instance, collisions causing injuries at one intersection went up 150 per cent. While Edmonton will also be making a case to the province to restore some cameras there, the city is still compiling crash statistics, Lamarre said.
But everyone is doing it?
While police officers use discretion when pulling over speeders, there’s no minimum speed over the limit that they must use to make their decision.
“The law doesn’t specify a threshold,” Corporal Troy Savinkoff, an Alberta RCMP spokesman, said in an e-mail. “One kilometre over the speed limit is an offence. The public is encouraged to drive the speed limit.”
So is there any truth to the idea that it’s safer to drive the same speed as the traffic around you, even if everyone else is speeding?
“There are studies that demonstrate that for every 1-per-cent increase in speed, fatal crash risk increases by approximately 4 to 12 per cent and serious crash risk by about 3 to 4 per cent,” he said. “Understanding that those percentages translate to people’s lives … [then] how many lives lost are acceptable? For me, I will keep driving the speed limit."
On major highways and expressways, a car going a lot slower than everyone else could be at a greater risk of rear-end and merging collisions, El-Basyouny said.
“That doesn’t justify universal speeding; it argues for credible limits, engineering that supports compliance and consistent enforcement so both the mean and variance come down,” he said.
Over all, it’s safer to go the speed limit everywhere, El-Basyouny said.
The reason? Physics. The faster everyone is going, the worse the collision. Also, at higher speeds, collisions are harder to avoid.
“An adult pedestrian’s chance of surviving a collision is high at around 30 kilometres an hour and drops sharply at speeds of 40-50 kilometres an hour,” he said. “Just five to 10 [kilometres an hour over the limit] can be the difference between injury and death.”
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