Thankfully, lessons from Europe seem to be penetrating Canada now; at least in the more urban areas. I saw some fantastic progress living in Montréal. Ottawa has the right ideas despite the master plan not being clear to people yet. Toronto was on the right path, but we’ll see what provincial pressures do. My current town of Kingston is late to the party, but we’ve got momentum in the right direction.

We spent 50+ years changing our built environment to “optimise” for the car, even with the best intentions it’s going to take time to change again.

How fast your car can go and how busy the road is irrelevant. Fact is you were exceeding the limit. Yes our road design sucks. It costs millions to rehabilitate just 1 road while it costs thousands to operate the cameras. People are literally dying due to excessive speeds on our roadways so I’ll take the not perfect solution of speed enforcement over nothing.

If only we had real world data showing that there are several examples of speed cameras having a positive effect on driver behavior… Even if it was “just a cash grab”, it’s still a productive thing to do, as it can be used to fund the infrastructure changes of actually designing roads to their desired speeds.

poor people

a sports car that can go like 100 in second gear

lmao ok

doesn’t feel fair

Why? Why does it feel unfair to follow the speed limit?

So let’s push for that instead of pushing to remove cameras. In fact, proportional fines would probably increase the revenue, which would bring the funds to improve the road design so folks don’t get the wrong impression of the speed they’re supposed to be in. Also let’s push for better transit so poor people are not forced to drive and risk getting fined.

If you’re that worried about it being a tax on poor people, advocate for free, high quality public transit. The way car centric places are designed right now basically means car ownership is the tax you pay to participate in society unless you want a significantly slower and scheduled experience trying to use transit.

I’ve been driving for 30 years and guess what? Never got a single ticket. It’s actually a tax on the stupid, the arrogant, and the impatient. And I’m super fine with that.

The car can almost go 300km/h so i believe it’s totally valid to drive 10 over the speed limit when safe to do so lmao

What does the top speed of a car has to do with how safe it is to go 10 km/h over the posted speed limit?

Driving a center waited sports car is a lot easier to handle, and especially stop, than say a pickup truck right

Also these speed limits were put in place when vehicles still had drum brakes haha

The road I was stopped on should be 70 imo

While I’m down for eating the billionaires, this sounds awfully close to punishing people for being successful.

I agree it disproportionally affects poor people, but rather than scaling the punishment, maybe the answer is to look for non punitive measures that produce the same result.

I’m in agreement that we need systemic solutions, and those involve improving road design, so we agree for the most part on the most important aspect of this.

punishing people for being successful.

But issuing bigger fines for breaking the law is very, VERY far from punishing people for being successful. It’s a correction of an unfortunate truth: if you’re wealthy, you can afford to drive recklessly.

Even then, I’d argue they still disproportionately impact those most likely to be on the road - those who need to drive for or to work.

But so what? Drive the speed limit and you don’t get ticketed. This isn’t some unfair cop picking and choosing who to pull over. Add scaling fines for income and its STILL going to disproportionally impact working class people.

Its still not an argument to get rid of them

People who feel they can drive fast never understand that the road may not be built for extra speed. Most often in cities there aren’t long enough sight lines for traffic joining a road to see a car that is speeding until it is too close. Speeders and zig zaggers don’t see what the cars behind them see: that it is actually the great defensive driving, emergency braking, swerving, going on in their wake, that allows their “safe” passage through traffic - none of which would be needed if they weren’t so selfish.

Calming measures work.

Speed cameras do not.

Spend money on calming measures but they won’t because revenue, and the camera companies give the sweet, sweet perks to get the revenue sharing contracts.

Go on, ram into everything at top speed, unleash chaos, pedal to the metal

Calming measures work.

Yes, they do. And NIMBYs hate them more than automated traffic cameras.

Speed cameras do not.

They have demonstrated to be effective in all the Canadian municipalities who have implemented them. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise?

The problem is people don’t like getting caught for breaking the law, so they either vandalize or petition against these cameras.

Alternatively, they could drive the posted speed limit and not run red lights. ‍️

Unscaled fines punish people for being poor, because the punishment is a larger percentage of their disposable income.

Why should a poor person pay a fine of 30% of their monthly take home, while a rich enough person pays 5% (or less?) of their take home for the same infraction.

The only fair solution is for the fine to amount to an equal percent of your take home pay. Then it is the same punishment for everyone.

They disproportionately effect assholes who speed. The fines are harder to pay if you are poor but they are equally easy to avoid for both rich and poor.

Found the BMW driver.

Adding narrow shoulders, speed bumps and plastic bollards to the center of roads all slow down traffic because they makes it difficult and uncomfortable to speed. They also drive all the assholes back to main streets instead of taking their big-brain shortcuts through residential areas.

Speed cameras reduce speeding on the main streets by costing you money. After your 3rd, 5th, or 15th automatic ticket you will eventually slow down. You can’t narrow the ridiculous 4 lane city streets in Brampton to slow people down, you can’t put speed bumps in an 80 zone, speed cameras are a cheap and easy to deploy method of convincing drivers to slow the fuck down.