A car is in flames after crashing into a light pole on Laird Drive in Toronto's east end on May 19, 2026.Andrew Clark/The Globe and Mail
It was a typical Sunday afternoon. The FIFA World Cup Final had just started, and I decided to go for a drive. To me, soccer is like folk music. I don’t have anything against it; I just don’t want to watch it being performed. I was hoping that traffic would be light because all the soccer fans would be glued to their screens; I was looking forward to a nice stretch of clear roads.
I guess I wasn’t the only one. Travelling south on Laird Drive in Toronto’s east end, I came upon a car in flames. The vehicle appeared to have hit the back of a Honda CR-V, run through a metal fence and knocked over a cement light post. Police, fire trucks and ambulances were on the scene. So far as I could see, no one had been injured.
As onlookers gathered, we were all likely thinking the same thing: How does this happen on a street with a 50-kilometre-an-hour speed limit?
To the crowd assembled, it appeared to be more proof, as if we needed it, that speeding is dangerous. An analysis of the 2021 Motor Vehicle Traffic Collision Statistics by Transport Canada report found that 24.7 per cent of fatalities involved speeding. A recent study from the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) that examined speed-related fatalities in Canada between 2000 and 2023 put the number even higher, finding that speed-related fatalities represented nearly one-third (30.7 per cent) of all road deaths. “Between 2019 and 2023, nearly three in 10 (29.2 per cent) fatally injured drivers were speeding … In 2023, road deaths involving at least one speeding driver rose to 513, up from 412 in 2019.”
So, we know it’s dangerous. You can now add pointless to the list.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota (UMN) have discovered that, on average, speeding saves drivers 54 seconds a trip. Yep, less than a minute. Not only that but adhering to the speed limit could curb fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and save billions of dollars. The findings were recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Sustainability.
The project began in 2021 when University of Minnesota purchased four days of data from a third-party reseller of telematics data. They selected four consecutive Wednesdays. Teams of researchers have spent the last five years analyzing more than 120 million real-world vehicle trips around the United States – a colossal undertaking involving billions of data points. The trips were of random lengths. There were two-mile trips as well as 100-mile trips in the dataset (around three to 160 kilometres).
“It was the first time that we were doing this, so it took some trial and error to get it working,” says Bharat Jayaprakash during an interview from Minnesota. Jayaprakash is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UMN and lead author on the paper. “The average time savings is small because the average trip length is small, somewhere between six and nine miles (9.7 to 14.5 kilometres).”
Their findings show that if “drivers complied with posted speed limits,” it could save an average of $30.9-million (22.7 million litres of fuel multiplied by the average price in the U.S.) and 57,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide every single day for light-duty engine-powered vehicles – which account for 14.6 per cent of total energy consumption in the United States. They analyzed trips taken in the U.S. on roads with speed limits of 45 miles per hour (73 km/h). Of these, 43.2 per cent involved some speeding and, over all, drivers spent 12 per cent of their time over the limit. The faster you drive, the more fuel you use and, the more fuel you use, the more carbon dioxide you emit.
Previous research on speeding was localized and small scale. The University of Minnesota study gives a view on a massive scale and provides a clear picture of the impact speeding can play and the paltry benefits it offers.
The research was inspired by an increase in speeding that occurred during the pandemic. “If you talk to any municipal city or police official and they’ll tell you that speeding increased a lot in 2020,” according to study co-author William Northrop, a University of Minnesota mechanical engineering professor. “It remained fairly high in 2021 and it’s remained high; studies have shown that the speeding has pretty much remained where it was during COVID.”
Northrop adds, “We already know the physics of the problem, right? There are plenty of papers that tell us. We know that speeding creates problems with safety and how fuel use increases with speed. That can be done in a lab, that can be done on an individual vehicle level. Quantifying it for the entire fleet was the big leap.”
States had different levels of speeding. Nevada, which has some of the highest speed limits in the U.S., nonetheless had a high rate of speeding, while states such as Montana and Wyoming had low rates.
While the UMN study did not examine the psychological causes of speeding, I mentioned to the authors that it seems as if drivers transform into speed demons after being stuck in congestion.
Maybe it makes drivers feel like they are taking action, fighting back against being stuck in traffic? To just go with the flow of traffic would make us feel powerless … and late. What these drivers should really do is just leave earlier.
“There is a place in Minneapolis. Every day it’s backed up and there’s nothing really drivers can do about it,” Northrop says. “The second they get out of it, they’re up to 90 miles an hour. We’re not even taking that on in this study. We’re not taking the acceleration factor into account. And that’s another whole piece that we want to add.”
The authors plan to expand their research framework to a more diverse set of roadways and get a fuller understanding of the impacts of aggressive accelerations on fuel use and emissions.
Back to the driver of the flaming car on Laird Drive. I contacted Toronto Police Services media relations department, which said the 29-year-old driver of the vehicle that struck the pole was charged with several Highway Traffic Act violations including careless driving and driving while under suspension. Because the case is before the courts, the speed involved isn’t being made available.
As I watched the firefighters extinguish the blaze, a middle-aged man in a Nike T-shirt and shorts arrived and stood beside me. Car wrecks bring out the extrovert in Canadians. He turned to me, smiling, and said, “Kind of makes you appreciate what you have.” In the distance, a man with his head bowed, lit a cigarette. We both assumed it was the driver and agreed that all involved were not having a great afternoon.