On Speed Cameras

Header image: Arthur White-Crummey/CBC

There’s a lot of talk of speed cameras in the media and in politics right now. In Ontario, the provincial government is considering outright banning them, just as municipalities are starting to report their effectiveness in reducing speeds and improving safety. Based on a recent conversation with a friend who supports banning cameras, I’ve written this post to dissect some of the tensions at play on this issue, acknowledge why people are frustrated by them, and offer a technical perspective on solutions.

A Culture of Speeding: “I was only going 10 over”

Growing up in Ontario, I was raised that it’s okay to drive over the speed limit. If the limit was 40, I’d drive 50. For 50, I’d drive 60, and so on. I’m told that in other countries, this is very unusual, and the speed limit is truly that – the maximum speed that people will drive.

This tells me we have a cultural norm (or an unwritten rule, dare I say) of driving over the posted speed limit. So much so, that if you told someone driving 60 km/h in a 50 km/h zone that they were speeding, they’d be offended that you suggested they did such a horrible thing. To many, the term speeding is associated with stunt drivers going 90 km/h in a school zone.

Even though we have legal rules, when the established culture is different, there is a lot of friction created when those legal rules are suddenly enforced. Our police have limited resources, and in recent years many police forces have spent very little effort ticketing speeders, which has drifted our culture on speeding even further.

Over-Engineered Roads: “Driving the speed limit feels so slow!”

Another conflating factor is the engineering profession’s longstanding tradition of designing roads for speeds greater than the intended posted speed. It’s common for a 60 km/h street to be designed for 80 km/h. This means gentler curves and very long sightlines. Many drivers will tell you that driving the posted speed on many roads feels too slow, and they’re not wrong – these roads were designed so that drivers feel comfortable driving much faster than the posted speed limit.

Roads can also be over-engineered in the traffic engineering sense, where multiple travel lanes are provided to accommodate peak-hour demand (either existing or predicted in the future). Outside of busy times, the extra capacity on these wide roads makes it very easy to speed.

Shortage of Design Solutions: “We put up a bigger sign. Sorry, there’s nothing else we can do.”

Another issue is that the engineering “toolbox” of solutions for reducing speeds on faster / arterial roads is extremely limited. You can’t use things like speed tables because they will slow down emergency vehicles. You can’t use narrower lanes because of buses and trucks. You can’t plant trees or place bollards close to the road because drivers will hit them and damage their cars. With all of these more effective solutions off the table, the options for managing speed on arterials are limited to flashing signs, reducing speed limits, and enforcement measures (which includes speed cameras).

Important to mention here is that other countries like Australia actually do use more aggressive design measures to manage speed on arterial roads, and countries including the Netherlands will design roads to make drivers feel uncomfortable exceeding the posted speed limit (referred to as “self-explaining roads”).

Arbitrary Speed Limits: “I didn’t know it was a 40 km/h zone!”

The final conflating factor is a lack of consistency in how speed limits are set. Often it’s done based on how fast the fastest drivers are actually travelling (the 85th percentile role), but limits are also changed based on resident complaints in response to specific issues. So a speed limit along a corridor might change several times even if the design and context of the road stays the exact same. This creates a heavy reliance on drivers constantly scanning the roadside for posted speed signs, rather than intuitively understanding what speed they should be travelling.

Now it’s important to say that when people and elected officials ask for lower speed limits, it’s not an ill-advised request. But when those speed limits are reduced without changing the road, or without some guiding policy related to land use, we make the road environment less consistent for drivers. There should be a close relationship between the surrounding context of the road, the design of the road, and the posted speed limit.

Solutions to Speeding

Speed kills. This is something that cannot be said enough. Any decision to increase speeds will cause more death and injury on our streets, and any decision to reduce them will cause the reverse. Here are three practical solutions that can help address speeding on major arterials.

• Changing our engineering practices for urban areas to design for a target speed. This requires a culture change on the engineering side, development of new guidelines, and several decades of implementation. I’m hopeful that a new publication from TAC due later this year will be the first step in this long journey.
• Choosing speed limits / target speeds based on what’s safe for the context of the street. A street running through a mixed-use area with a lot of multimodal activity should have lower driving speeds because of the higher likelihood of and potential for harm. There are appropriate ways to do this, and NACTO’s Safe Speeds is a great resource for identifying appropriate speeds based on context.
• And yes, speed cameras. They can be installed quickly and cheaply, allowing them to be used in response to issues much faster than a road redesign, which can take years if not decades. They’re also an important tool for addressing our problematic culture of speeding: when cameras are installed broadly enough that people expect them anywhere, drivers will pay more attention to their speed everywhere.

Cash Grab?

Herein lies the issue, the source of the political rhetoric that cameras are a “cash grab”. For all I care, the revenue from cameras could be donated to charity – it’s the cameras themselves that have the positive benefit, and the revenue from them seems to cause more problems than solutions. When cities start to depend on this revenue for “general revenue” to offset tax increases, they are more incentivized to put them in “revenue-generating” locations, like busy arterials with high design speeds where speeding is commonplace. My recommendation would be to place stricter rules on how the revenue is spent: it should be used to fund road safety initiatives only, so that eventually we reach a point where the cameras themselves are no longer needed.