In July, after about two years of preamble, the Municipality of Brighton implemented the Automated Speed Enforcement program in our Community Safety Zone. As of last week, I had heard that over 8,500 tickets had gone out. Municipal staff have been inundated with complaints and appeals of tickets, and there’s a lot of confusion floating out there, so here’s a quick primer and some thoughts on why this is so controversial.
How It Works
Speed limits exist on every public road, designated with white signs with black text that are hard to miss. Special sections of road, called Community Safety Zones, have a lower speed limit and higher fines. Brighton’s Community Safety Zone includes the area around Brighton Public School, East Northumberland Secondary School, the Community Centre, and Applefest Lodge. This area has regular foot traffic including children of all ages, and seniors, so we make a special effort to ensure everyone drives safely there.
Traditional speed enforcement involves the OPP catching someone speeding, pulling them over, and issuing a ticket. Traffic stops create a hazard on the road, a confrontation with an armed officer, and often, a waste of court time as drivers and police officers have to argue over the facts when the driver appeals the ticket. When a ticket is paid, it is a provincial revenue. Attached to the fine is a Victim Fine surcharge, which goes to support programming for victims of various crimes.
With Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE), no police officers are necessary to enforce the speed limit. A stationary camera is set on either side of the road, one for each lane, and takes a photo of the license plate of any vehicle that is speeding. The cameras are calibrated regularly to ensure that their radars are detecting your speed correctly. When someone is speeding, software makes an attempt to read the license plate in the photo, but it must be verified by a human before any ticket is sent out. Fines are sent to the owner of the vehicle. If the owner of the vehicle wants to appeal the ticket they can see our Deputy Clerk; if they wish a further appeal, the municipality retains a third-party arbitrator who can hear an appeal. When the fine is paid, it becomes a municipal revenue rather than a provincial one. The Victim Fine surcharge is still collected and forwarded on to the province. You can see more information on the municipal website.
By bringing speed enforcement in-house we not only reduced the expensive use of police officers and courts, but we also implemented a system in which nobody gets fined without photo evidence of them speeding. And the revenues from speeding fines in Brighton will get to stay in Brighton, and can be used to make our roads even safer.
How It’s Working
We expected that there would be people talking about a “tax grab,” but the level of pushback has been surprising to me. The complaints that I’ve heard about, whether told to me directly or posted to social media or vented out in the library, don’t always make a lot of sense; this suggests to me that the issue isn’t a rational one, and it’s worth thinking more deeply about.
Complaints I’ve heard, firsthand or secondhand, include:
- “Do you expect me to watch my speedometer, or the road?”
- “I was following the person in front of me so close, how safe would it have been if I’d had to be watching my speedometer the whole time?”
- “But I always drive 60 there.”
- “But I had to get somewhere quickly.”
- “If I had received the first ticket in a timely fashion, I would have known not to speed there and wouldn’t have gotten all of these other tickets.”
In case anyone is truly wondering: yes, you must be able to watch the road and the speedometer in order to drive effectively; you should not be tailgating; habitual speeding is the reason for speed enforcement in the first place rather than a rational argument to get out of a ticket; and individual circumstances do not exempt people from following the law.
That last argument seems like an opportunity for compassion, at first glance; it’s hard not to feel for someone with multiple tickets at a time, and the time it takes to ensure that a human has verified every ticket means that sometimes we won’t receive our ticket for weeks after the infraction. But the idea that someone didn’t know not to speed until they received a ticket is a little silly. There are very prominent speed limit signs, a digital sign that measures your speed (if you’re headed westbound), a large roadside sign indicating the date that fines will begin to be issued, and legally-mandated signs warning of the implementation of ASE that were up for about a year before the cameras were turned on. I get that not everyone follows what happens at council, but nobody who drives that stretch of road has any excuse for not knowing the speed limit or the possibility of getting a ticket.
It should be very clear to everyone that none of these excuses make sense, and yet they’re extremely common. So what’s actually happening?
Change is always hard, so there’s that. Facing consequences for actions, when we’ve been able to avoid consequences for them for a very long time, can feel startling and even unjust. There’s a strong culture of speeding, in which we expect to always drive 10km/h faster than the posted limit because police officers generally won’t ticket someone at that rate; and people love telling stories about talking their way out of a ticket. ASE undercuts that logic entirely. I can see how that would be discomfiting. I have genuine compassion for people who’ve received tickets; it never feels good to have a ticket, and with photo evidence we have no real ability to get out of it. That’s hard.
But when it comes down to it, would we prefer a world where laws don’t really mean what they say, just because they’re hard to enforce? Or should we see the number on the speed limit sign as meaning something important?
What’s Next
I expect council will get a report about ASE in the near future, which will include stats about how many tickets were issued, how many of those were paid, how many appeals were successful, and whether there’s a trend in the data. Ideally, we’ll see fewer and fewer tickets as time goes on.
From the beginning of this discussion, council was clear and pretty united on the idea that the goal always had to be to slow traffic, not to increase revenues. While revenues are always welcome, speeding tickets are a very, very regressive way to generate municipal revenues. Property tax is regressive enough — it costs the poor nearly as much as the rich — but fines are a big deal to the poor and barely an inconvenience to the rich. We don’t do this to make money, and what money is raised from these tickets (in my opinion) should go back into traffic calming measures throughout the community. This isn’t the only stretch of road in town that has issues with speeding, and while we can only put up ASE in Community Safety Zones, the resources we gain from speed enforcement there could be used to calm traffic on Ontario Street, Raglan, or anywhere else. I would be open to extending the Community Safety Zone through the downtown core, given the number of pedestrians on Main Street and the all-too-frequent near misses there; and once we receive the Transportation Master Plan (due any day now) we will have better data about where more traffic calming is most needed.
The bottom line is that we would be very, very happy to never issue a speeding ticket. Please, please slow down. Set your cruise control to 39 in the 40 zone, if you’re having a hard time watching your speedometer and the road at the same time. Recognize the reality that speeding through a Community Safety Zone will only gain you a few seconds of time; if you’re late or have an emergency, it won’t help to speed. Ultimately, whether or not you get a speeding ticket is in your hands.
And if you do want to appeal, please be kind to staff. They’re just doing their job.
Thanks for being such a helpful source of information Jeff. Once again, the facts are important.
Thanks Patti! The feelings are important too, and I don’t want to negate them or devalue them. I think it’s important to ensure the facts are clear, but also to sit with the feelings and see if they line up with the facts. Then we can get to the heart of the issue. I don’t know if I’ve managed it this time, but here’s hoping!
Thank you for your common sense approach. I’ve shared on Facebook. I also support the 60 km zone to Boes Road. That stretch was crazy at 80.
Thank you Susan!
At first I struggled with the new 60 stretch there, but I think I’m getting used to it. It’s interesting how much we automate our driving experience, unconsciously settling into the speed we’re accustomed to, and that can take time to change. Hopefully people are slowing down there, too.
Let’s face it, speed cameras really make little difference. We’ve had them in parts of Europe for 30-40+ years and people learn where they are and just slow down for that few ~100 yards. If we want to make a difference either we need average speed cameras or to resort to proper traffic calming measures. The current setup just makes folks speed down the backroads that are even less equipped for traffic than HW2..
Thanks for speaking out! I’m sorry that you’re unhappy.
The point of these cameras is specifically to slow people down for a few hundred yards; they’re placed in a Community Safety Zone, the area around which includes two schools, a community centre, and a retirement residence, as well as a long sidewalk to Tim Hortons that many people (mostly kids) walk each day. On the western side of the zone there are two stoplights and a two-way stop intersection, which keeps traffic slow; on the east side there’s a stoplight and a series of signs, all of which hopefully keep people slow. The problem area is the long stretch in between — a stretch that’s actually only a few hundred meters long — where people pick up speed. That’s where the cameras are now. If the only thing they do is slow people down for a few ~100 yards, then they’re doing all we need them to.
I’ve had a few people mention speeding down back roads in response to this, and that’s a clear indication to me that people aren’t thinking very clearly. If you took Smith St to avoid the cameras you’d add a few minutes to your trip, even speeding; whereas if you just do the speed limit (40) along that short stretch instead of, say, 60, you’d only lose a few seconds of time. If that, depending on traffic. Does driving at 40 really feel so bad that you’d be willing to lose time AND take risks instead?
I will say again that this is not at all the only traffic calming measure we’re taking. Other possible measures include signs (there are seven of them between the traffic lights at No Frills and the speed cameras), police enforcement (which is more expensive and undesirable on a busy street), paint on the road (which is helpful but limited in effectiveness), and physical changes to the road such as installing speed bumps and narrowing lanes. Physical changes get a lot more expensive, and my goal is to pay for those changes with revenues from the speeding fines (which, without the cameras, would be paid to the province; since these fines are issued by municipal by-law, we get to keep the revenues and use them locally). I’m not a fan of speed bumps, which punish everyone equally and wear out our vehicle suspension. I am a fan of narrowing the lanes, which can be accomplished through sticking plastic bollards along the edges of the lanes – you may have noticed that Cobourg recently installed some in their Community Safety Zone on hwy 2. They aren’t a barrier, but our minds perceive them as something to avoid, so we slow down. They’re cheap compared to road work, but they’re not free, and need to be installed and removed seasonally. In winter people usually drive slower, but not always; the cameras will be there to slow people when the seasonal bollards are not.
Personally, I have found that my own behaviour has changed as a result of the cameras. I am more conscious of my speed whenever I’m in any municipality; I drive slower now in Trenton and Cobourg than I used to, because these cameras in Brighton have helped me to adjust my sense of just how fast I should be moving. Ultimately that was what a speed limit was supposed to do, but since we’ve never enforced the speed limit in an objective, consistent way (rarely getting caught, often getting just a warning), we’ve continued to drive as fast as feels safe rather than the posted limit. If we can internalize that the limit is the limit, as I think I’m beginning to, then we’ll all drive safer, because accidents happen when our perception of safe driving doesn’t align with the reality on the road. Aligning our perception with the posted speed limit should make it easier to be safe, and ideally we’ll never issue another ticket again and won’t need cameras anywhere else in Brighton either.