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Two decades after Ontario’s fledgling photo radar program was scrapped, a growing chorus of cities now begs for its return, writes Matthew Pearson. Some say it’s a cash grab, but others point to the early success of Quebec’s initiative and wonder if the same strategy could be used on this side of the river. Next week, Ottawa city council will weigh in.
The white Nissan van parked in front of a Gatineau elementary school is straight out of Doc Brown’s lab in Back to the Future. There’s a pole with two lights poking out the top and three black-rimmed portholes above the windshield that look like beady little eyes.
They are, in fact, eyes on the road.
A steady rain falls as cars pass by on St. René Boulevard West, some obeying the 30 km/h speed limit, others flagrantly ignoring it.
But in a few weeks’ time, some of these drivers might receive a speeding ticket in the mail because this white van is a photo radar vehicle, one of two used by Gatineau police as part of an 18-month pilot project launched last fall.
Working with Quebec’s transport ministry, police identified 21 trouble spots, all listed on the city’s website. They also monitor construction sites and school zones.
“The goal is to reduce accidents,” says police spokesman Jean-Paul Le May.
Inside the van, which is about the size of a camper, a lone officer keeps a steady eye on a laptop screen. Every time a car drives by, the speed it is travelling pops up on the screen.
Officers don’t decide which drivers get a ticket, Le May explains. They determine a threshold in advance, set up the van and start snapping photos of rear licence plates as cars pass by. The information is all sent to Montreal, where it’s analyzed and from where tickets are issued.
Two decades after a triumphant Progressive Conservative government swept to power on a promise to scrap Ontario’s fledgling photo radar program, a growing chorus of cities is now begging for its return. Mayors in Toronto, Hamilton and York Region have all petitioned the province to make it an option for tackling lead-footed drivers in their midst.
Next week, Ottawa city council will debate whether it should do the same.
While some scoff that photo radar is nothing more than a money grab by cash-starved municipal coffers, others point to the early success of Quebec’s initiative and say photo radar is just another tool the city could — and should — have at its fingertips.
**
Coun. Riley Brockington’s River ward has within its boundaries some major traffic arteries — the Airport Parkway, Walkley Road, Riverside Drive, Hunt Club Road, Prince of Wales Drive.
Since his election in 2014, Brockington has repeatedly said speeding and road safety are his residents’ top priority. They’ve become his top priority, too.
“We have streets in my ward where the posted speed limit may be 50 or 60 and people are doing easily 30 km/h above those posted limits,” he says.
The total number of reportable collisions across Ottawa dropped between 2013 and 2014, but the number of collisions with injuries increased from 1,477 in 2013 to 1,547 in 2014.
That same year, Hunt Club and Riverside, which is in Brockington’s ward, had the highest number of collisions of all signalized intersections (at 42, it was tied for first with the intersection of West Hunt Club Road and Woodroffe Avenue).
Riley Brockington wants photo radar. He is photographed on Riverside Dr. at the corner of Quesnel St in Ottawa. Photo by Jean Levac
Each councillor gets $40,000 per year to help address road safety concerns in their wards. The money can pay for painted pavement markings, digital speed display boards, yellow flex-sticks down the centre line and other community-led efforts to curb speeding, but the problem persists.
Brockington made the unusual step of appearing before the Ottawa Police Services Board last fall to press Chief Charles Bordeleau into dedicating more resources to traffic enforcement if the chief’s request to hire 25 new officers was ultimately granted, which it was.
But knowing it will never be feasible, financially and otherwise, to put a police officer on every stretch of busy road, Brockington has turned his attention to photo radar. “This is one tool of many that can be used to address speeding and road safety.”
He put his colleagues on notice last month that he’d introduce a motion at the next council meeting to formally ask the province to allow municipalities the option of using photo radar on local streets.
It’s too soon to talk about specific locations or technologies, Brockington says. Setting up the camera to do its thing without having a police office there to babysit would be ideal, though in Gatineau, officers always staff the mobile units (as part of the pilot, the force hired six additional officers, whose salaries, benefits and training are all paid for by the province).
Ottawa could use the money collected from photo-radar fines to pay for the equipment, as well as other traffic calming initiatives, says Brockington, who adds revenue generation is “absolutely not my motivation.”
Keith Egli, who chairs the transportation committee, agrees photo radar could be a useful tool, particularly near schools and seniors residences.
“I don’t know of a single councillor that doesn’t have a concern or hasn’t heard a concern from residents or community associations or schools about speeding,” the Knoxdale-Merivale councillor says.
An online petition currently making the rounds appears to back this up. The petition was launched by Dalhousie Community Association president Michael Powell and Kevin O’Donnell, a computer programmer and safety advocate who also does a small bit of contract work for city councillors Jeff Leiper and Tobi Nussbaum. It garnered several hundred signatures in its first week.
In a city of nearly a million people, that’s not a huge sample size, but the noteworthy part was where the support came from — residents from all 23 wards signed the petition.
O’Donnell says he was excited to learn Brockington was raising the idea of photo radar because speeding is a chronic problem where he lives in Westboro.
“I don’t worry about violent crime or drivebys or house invasions or even robberies,” he says. “I worry about walking up the street and everyone should because that’s the leading injury cause for everybody — car accidents and road conflicts.”
Since writing an opinion piece for Postmedia a few weeks back, Brockington says he’s been inundated with encouraging emails from residents, some of whom don’t even live in his ward.
“The police need help so why not use proven technology that has been around for decades to provide that help,” wrote a correspondent from Bells Corners.
Quebec’s transport ministry installed 15 photo radar and red light cameras in the area around Montreal in 2009 to see what effect the technology might have on drivers. Would they slow down? Would they quit running red lights?
The government did a before-and-after comparison using data from between 2005 to 2007 and another set from between 2011 to 2013.
It found the number of crashes was reduced by 58 per cent where stationary photo radar devices were installed and by 25 per cent where mobile photo radar devices were used. Quebec’s safety record for the same time periods, according to the ministry’s latest numbers, showed a 26 per cent decrease in the total number of crashes, while there was a 20 per cent decrease in the number of crashes that involved injuries.
Such promising results convinced Gatineau’s city council in July 2013 to approve the pilot project.
“We target precise locations where there’s an issue,” says Gatineau Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin. “The goal is not to make money, the goal is to solve problems and make sure our streets are safer.
“If it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t reduce the number of accidents, it’s not a tool we’re going to use.”
The city submitted a list of intersections with a high number of crashes to the province for approval, but eventually, the mayor says, he hopes the city will be able to determine where to put photo radar vehicles without needing to get the province’s permission.
Pedneaud-Jobin says his advice to colleagues across the river, including Mayor Jim Watson, with whom he has developed warm relations, is simple: “Try it.”
Gatineau Police Sgt. spokesperson, J.P. Lemay is photographed inside a photoradar van that’s recording vehicles speeding through a school zone outside L’Ecole de l’Odysee Wednesday, March 9, 2016.
**
Whether Watson will be convinced is up in the air. On the day Brockington raised the issue, the mayor said he wanted to research whether photo radar actually saves lives or increases public safety. Then he lobbed the singular criticism many critics do whenever the topic is broached: “I don’t want it as a cash grab.”
That’s always been the knock on photo radar. Governments tight on the cash and other resources needed to combat road safety issues effectively turn to photo radar and then get accustomed to the money it generates.
And let’s be clear, it generates real money.
Quebec’s transport ministry has collected more than $71 million since 2009, when photo radar machines were first introduced. Revenues have nearly tripled from $7.3 million that year to $21.5 million in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015.
The province’s two most lucrative traps, which target drivers in the Montreal area, alone raised $7.5 million in 2014/15.
But that’s not money in Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s pocket. In Quebec, money collected from photo radar-issued tickets goes to a special fund to keep the radars running, pay for other road safety initiatives and, eventually, support victims of road crashes. The money can’t be spent on public transit or infrastructure projects.
“Even if we wanted to use it for our own benefit, we wouldn’t be able to and I wouldn’t want to,” says Pedneaud-Jobin. “The only goal is public safety.”
That suggestion, however, might be a tougher sell in Edmonton, where the number of tickets — and the amount of ticket revenue — has skyrocketed since the city took over photo radar operations from the police.
In 2012, when the local police force ran the program, just 3,252 tickets were handed out to drivers going six- to 10 km/h over the speed limit. In 2014, with the city in control, that number shot up to 66,487 tickets, according to Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples.
Net revenues from tickets increased from $13.4 million in 2012 to $34.5 million in 2014.
There was also a suggestion from a former photo radar operator in Edmonton that the internal guidelines for handing out a photo radar ticket was secretly dropped from a threshold of 15 km/h to 10 km/h to bring in more cash. The city denied such a thing had occurred.
Regardless, results of a 2014 University of Alberta study suggest photo radar may have made a difference on the city’s roads. The number of severe collisions — those involving death or injury — has dropped 32 per cent, while speed-related collisions have dropped by nearly 27 per cent.
Critics of photo radar also lament it doesn’t target drunk or distracted drivers and doesn’t distinguish between casual, going-with-the-flow-of-traffic speeding and excessive, Fast-and-the-Furious speeding. They say the established speed limit of some roads simply doesn’t conform to average travel speeds, thereby letting governments collect fines from a random sampling of average drivers going about their daily business safely.
**
It’s late on a Friday afternoon and Brockington stands near a stretch of Riverside Drive.
Traffic on the four-lane road is heavy, with a steady flow of southbound cars heading for the Hunt Club bridge. The speed limit is 60 km/h along here, but cars and trucks whiz by.
Ottawa has a speeding problem. Police enforcement efforts are stretched and other measures have had limited success, the councillor says. It’s time for an adult conversation about photo radar.
“While I recognize there’s a history here and for some they just don’t support it at all, it is not motivated by some sort of financial pressure that the city has, rather it is completely geared towards improving public safety,” Brockington says.
“I’m just looking for options that are going to work.”
mpearson@postmedia.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
查看原文...
The white Nissan van parked in front of a Gatineau elementary school is straight out of Doc Brown’s lab in Back to the Future. There’s a pole with two lights poking out the top and three black-rimmed portholes above the windshield that look like beady little eyes.
They are, in fact, eyes on the road.
A steady rain falls as cars pass by on St. René Boulevard West, some obeying the 30 km/h speed limit, others flagrantly ignoring it.
But in a few weeks’ time, some of these drivers might receive a speeding ticket in the mail because this white van is a photo radar vehicle, one of two used by Gatineau police as part of an 18-month pilot project launched last fall.
Working with Quebec’s transport ministry, police identified 21 trouble spots, all listed on the city’s website. They also monitor construction sites and school zones.
“The goal is to reduce accidents,” says police spokesman Jean-Paul Le May.
Inside the van, which is about the size of a camper, a lone officer keeps a steady eye on a laptop screen. Every time a car drives by, the speed it is travelling pops up on the screen.
Officers don’t decide which drivers get a ticket, Le May explains. They determine a threshold in advance, set up the van and start snapping photos of rear licence plates as cars pass by. The information is all sent to Montreal, where it’s analyzed and from where tickets are issued.
Two decades after a triumphant Progressive Conservative government swept to power on a promise to scrap Ontario’s fledgling photo radar program, a growing chorus of cities is now begging for its return. Mayors in Toronto, Hamilton and York Region have all petitioned the province to make it an option for tackling lead-footed drivers in their midst.
Next week, Ottawa city council will debate whether it should do the same.
While some scoff that photo radar is nothing more than a money grab by cash-starved municipal coffers, others point to the early success of Quebec’s initiative and say photo radar is just another tool the city could — and should — have at its fingertips.
**
Coun. Riley Brockington’s River ward has within its boundaries some major traffic arteries — the Airport Parkway, Walkley Road, Riverside Drive, Hunt Club Road, Prince of Wales Drive.
Since his election in 2014, Brockington has repeatedly said speeding and road safety are his residents’ top priority. They’ve become his top priority, too.
“We have streets in my ward where the posted speed limit may be 50 or 60 and people are doing easily 30 km/h above those posted limits,” he says.
The total number of reportable collisions across Ottawa dropped between 2013 and 2014, but the number of collisions with injuries increased from 1,477 in 2013 to 1,547 in 2014.
That same year, Hunt Club and Riverside, which is in Brockington’s ward, had the highest number of collisions of all signalized intersections (at 42, it was tied for first with the intersection of West Hunt Club Road and Woodroffe Avenue).
Riley Brockington wants photo radar. He is photographed on Riverside Dr. at the corner of Quesnel St in Ottawa. Photo by Jean Levac
Each councillor gets $40,000 per year to help address road safety concerns in their wards. The money can pay for painted pavement markings, digital speed display boards, yellow flex-sticks down the centre line and other community-led efforts to curb speeding, but the problem persists.
Brockington made the unusual step of appearing before the Ottawa Police Services Board last fall to press Chief Charles Bordeleau into dedicating more resources to traffic enforcement if the chief’s request to hire 25 new officers was ultimately granted, which it was.
But knowing it will never be feasible, financially and otherwise, to put a police officer on every stretch of busy road, Brockington has turned his attention to photo radar. “This is one tool of many that can be used to address speeding and road safety.”
He put his colleagues on notice last month that he’d introduce a motion at the next council meeting to formally ask the province to allow municipalities the option of using photo radar on local streets.
It’s too soon to talk about specific locations or technologies, Brockington says. Setting up the camera to do its thing without having a police office there to babysit would be ideal, though in Gatineau, officers always staff the mobile units (as part of the pilot, the force hired six additional officers, whose salaries, benefits and training are all paid for by the province).
Ottawa could use the money collected from photo-radar fines to pay for the equipment, as well as other traffic calming initiatives, says Brockington, who adds revenue generation is “absolutely not my motivation.”
Keith Egli, who chairs the transportation committee, agrees photo radar could be a useful tool, particularly near schools and seniors residences.
“I don’t know of a single councillor that doesn’t have a concern or hasn’t heard a concern from residents or community associations or schools about speeding,” the Knoxdale-Merivale councillor says.
An online petition currently making the rounds appears to back this up. The petition was launched by Dalhousie Community Association president Michael Powell and Kevin O’Donnell, a computer programmer and safety advocate who also does a small bit of contract work for city councillors Jeff Leiper and Tobi Nussbaum. It garnered several hundred signatures in its first week.
In a city of nearly a million people, that’s not a huge sample size, but the noteworthy part was where the support came from — residents from all 23 wards signed the petition.
O’Donnell says he was excited to learn Brockington was raising the idea of photo radar because speeding is a chronic problem where he lives in Westboro.
“I don’t worry about violent crime or drivebys or house invasions or even robberies,” he says. “I worry about walking up the street and everyone should because that’s the leading injury cause for everybody — car accidents and road conflicts.”
Since writing an opinion piece for Postmedia a few weeks back, Brockington says he’s been inundated with encouraging emails from residents, some of whom don’t even live in his ward.
“The police need help so why not use proven technology that has been around for decades to provide that help,” wrote a correspondent from Bells Corners.
Quebec’s transport ministry installed 15 photo radar and red light cameras in the area around Montreal in 2009 to see what effect the technology might have on drivers. Would they slow down? Would they quit running red lights?
The government did a before-and-after comparison using data from between 2005 to 2007 and another set from between 2011 to 2013.
It found the number of crashes was reduced by 58 per cent where stationary photo radar devices were installed and by 25 per cent where mobile photo radar devices were used. Quebec’s safety record for the same time periods, according to the ministry’s latest numbers, showed a 26 per cent decrease in the total number of crashes, while there was a 20 per cent decrease in the number of crashes that involved injuries.
Such promising results convinced Gatineau’s city council in July 2013 to approve the pilot project.
“We target precise locations where there’s an issue,” says Gatineau Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin. “The goal is not to make money, the goal is to solve problems and make sure our streets are safer.
“If it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t reduce the number of accidents, it’s not a tool we’re going to use.”
The city submitted a list of intersections with a high number of crashes to the province for approval, but eventually, the mayor says, he hopes the city will be able to determine where to put photo radar vehicles without needing to get the province’s permission.
Pedneaud-Jobin says his advice to colleagues across the river, including Mayor Jim Watson, with whom he has developed warm relations, is simple: “Try it.”
Gatineau Police Sgt. spokesperson, J.P. Lemay is photographed inside a photoradar van that’s recording vehicles speeding through a school zone outside L’Ecole de l’Odysee Wednesday, March 9, 2016.
**
Whether Watson will be convinced is up in the air. On the day Brockington raised the issue, the mayor said he wanted to research whether photo radar actually saves lives or increases public safety. Then he lobbed the singular criticism many critics do whenever the topic is broached: “I don’t want it as a cash grab.”
That’s always been the knock on photo radar. Governments tight on the cash and other resources needed to combat road safety issues effectively turn to photo radar and then get accustomed to the money it generates.
And let’s be clear, it generates real money.
Quebec’s transport ministry has collected more than $71 million since 2009, when photo radar machines were first introduced. Revenues have nearly tripled from $7.3 million that year to $21.5 million in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015.
The province’s two most lucrative traps, which target drivers in the Montreal area, alone raised $7.5 million in 2014/15.
But that’s not money in Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s pocket. In Quebec, money collected from photo radar-issued tickets goes to a special fund to keep the radars running, pay for other road safety initiatives and, eventually, support victims of road crashes. The money can’t be spent on public transit or infrastructure projects.
“Even if we wanted to use it for our own benefit, we wouldn’t be able to and I wouldn’t want to,” says Pedneaud-Jobin. “The only goal is public safety.”
That suggestion, however, might be a tougher sell in Edmonton, where the number of tickets — and the amount of ticket revenue — has skyrocketed since the city took over photo radar operations from the police.
In 2012, when the local police force ran the program, just 3,252 tickets were handed out to drivers going six- to 10 km/h over the speed limit. In 2014, with the city in control, that number shot up to 66,487 tickets, according to Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples.
Net revenues from tickets increased from $13.4 million in 2012 to $34.5 million in 2014.
There was also a suggestion from a former photo radar operator in Edmonton that the internal guidelines for handing out a photo radar ticket was secretly dropped from a threshold of 15 km/h to 10 km/h to bring in more cash. The city denied such a thing had occurred.
Regardless, results of a 2014 University of Alberta study suggest photo radar may have made a difference on the city’s roads. The number of severe collisions — those involving death or injury — has dropped 32 per cent, while speed-related collisions have dropped by nearly 27 per cent.
Critics of photo radar also lament it doesn’t target drunk or distracted drivers and doesn’t distinguish between casual, going-with-the-flow-of-traffic speeding and excessive, Fast-and-the-Furious speeding. They say the established speed limit of some roads simply doesn’t conform to average travel speeds, thereby letting governments collect fines from a random sampling of average drivers going about their daily business safely.
**
It’s late on a Friday afternoon and Brockington stands near a stretch of Riverside Drive.
Traffic on the four-lane road is heavy, with a steady flow of southbound cars heading for the Hunt Club bridge. The speed limit is 60 km/h along here, but cars and trucks whiz by.
Ottawa has a speeding problem. Police enforcement efforts are stretched and other measures have had limited success, the councillor says. It’s time for an adult conversation about photo radar.
“While I recognize there’s a history here and for some they just don’t support it at all, it is not motivated by some sort of financial pressure that the city has, rather it is completely geared towards improving public safety,” Brockington says.
“I’m just looking for options that are going to work.”
mpearson@postmedia.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
查看原文...
