Vandals removed a speed camera from a post on Parkside Drive next to High Park in Toronto in May.The Globe and Mail
Doug Ford is a tough-on-crime guy. He backs our men and women in blue to the hilt. He rants about judges letting crooks off too easily. He believes in enforcing the law.
Except, it seems, the law against destroying public property. When vandals destroyed 16 Toronto speed cameras this week, he didn’t seem especially bothered. While Mayor Olivia Chow denounced the acts of “lawlessness” and police said they were striving to catch the perpetrators, Ontario’s Premier delivered a diatribe against the cameras instead.
In his view, they are nothing but a “tax grab.” Toronto, he said, should remove all of them. “Get rid of the speed cameras or I’m going to do it,” he told reporters.
That was obviously the wrong message to send in the midst of a police investigation. It undermined the public officials who were rightly condemning the brazen destruction of law-enforcement equipment. And it suggested that taking the law into your own hands is somehow okay if you choose the right target.
The vandals must be feeling like heroes of the people right now. The Premier himself shares their anger.
Editorial: Sorry, speed cameras aren’t the problem
But Mr. Ford was wrong on the substance of the issue, too. The speed cameras are not a cash grab. The amount they bring in is substantial – $45-million so far this year – but a drop in the bucket for a city with an annual budget of close to $20-billion.
Toronto introduced speed cameras under a conservative mayor, John Tory. They were one of several measures intended not to raise money but to calm traffic and save lives. The Vision Zero campaign aimed to reduce the shocking number of people who were being killed on city streets: 78 in 2016, the year it began. That was down to 49 last year.
The calming measures included watch-your-speed signs in school zones, new traffic signals, more pedestrian crosswalks and red-light cameras to catch motorists who blast through intersections.
The speed cameras have gone up across the city, usually near schools or places where lots of pedestrians and cyclists can be found. Toronto has 150 of them now – or did before the vigilantes came along.
If you are driving above the limit, the camera takes a picture of your licence plate and you get a ticket. That annoys many motorists, who see Big Brother looking over their shoulder. But, for privacy reasons, the cameras capture the plate, not the driver.
People hate drivers who speed. People also hate speed cameras. What can we do?
And no one can say they were not warned. The city puts up coming-soon signs three months before each camera is activated and maintains an online map showing the location of each one. The whole point is to make drivers think twice before putting the pedal to the metal.
It seems to work. A recent study led by researchers from the Hospital for Sick Children and Toronto Metropolitan University found that after the cameras went up, the number of speeders fell by close to half. The number going more than 20 kilometres an hour over the posted limit – the most dangerous group – dropped by 87 per cent.
Countries around the world, from Britain to Japan, use cameras to control speeding. The city of New York has 2,400 of them in school zones alone. Their spread is part of a global effort to make city streets safer, less polluted and more pleasant, ending the hegemony of the automobile. The snarl of traffic that used to clog New York’s Times Square is gone; it’s a pedestrian zone now. In Paris, a highway that ran along the Right Bank of the Seine has been replaced by a riverside park. Both cities are far more livable as a result.
Mr. Ford seems deaf to all this. He is determined to end what he and his late brother Rob called the “war on the car.” He has cut gas taxes and eliminated the remaining tolls on publicly owned highways. He is trying to remove the bike lanes on three major Toronto streets. Now he wants to get rid of speed cameras.
That may go over well in the vote-rich, car-dependent suburbs. Residents of Vaughan, north of Toronto, revolted when their city introduced speed cameras this spring and issued more than 30,000 tickets. Fines are paused for now.
But what is smart politics is still poor policy. Speeding is dangerous and, well, illegal. A premier who really believes in law and order should be doing all he can to stop it.