Speed cameras have been making headlines in Toronto all summer, but what if they also rewarded drivers for good behaviour?
Stockholm, Sweden, ran an experiment doing just that. Back in 2011, the city ran a pilot program over three days where drivers caught speeding were fined, while drivers who obeyed posted speed limits were entered into a lottery for cash prizes, with the money pooled together from the tickets issued to speeding drivers.
One law-abiding driver, Bengt Holmström, was the winner of the draw, taking home 20,000 Swedish krona, or $2,968.76 CAD. In addition to Holmström’s win, five other drivers also won cash prizes of 10,000 krona each during the pilot.
According to the automotive company Volkswagen, which was involved in the 2011 experiment, speeds during the Stockholm experiment decreased by 22 per cent and remained low afterwards.
REWARDING GOOD TORONTO DRIVERS?
Safe Parkside is an organization in the city’s west end that’s advocating for a safer Parkside Drive, which has been making recent headlines for the multiple speed cameras that have been cut down. In fact, this week alone at least 16 speed cameras were cut down across the city.
Co-Chair Faraz Gholizadeh tells Now Toronto that incentivizing good drivers is a good idea.
“There’s the carrot and the stick. The speed camera is the stick, and it’d be nice to throw in a carrot in there too to try to incentivize slower, attentive driving, [and] obeying the speed limit,”Gholizadeh said on Friday.
“If they did do a lottery for the Parkside Drive speed camera, $7 million plus would be quite the jackpot for someone to win. So you know, that would definitely be very effective,” he continued, explaining that over 70,000 tickets worth around $7 million have been issued by the camera on Parkside Dr.
Friends and Families for Safe Streets is a Toronto organization founded by people whose loved ones were killed after being hit by reckless drivers, as well as people who sustained life-altering injuries in a crash. Spokesperson Jess Speiker says that if the city is willing to try something like this, it could be an effective solution to speeding in Toronto.
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“I’m continually baffled by how some members of the public think that they have a right to break the law and are very upset when they’re caught breaking the law and have consequences imposed on them for breaking the law,” Spieker told Now Toronto.
“To have also a carrot element, in addition to the stick element, might make some inroads with those members of the public who are so upset.”
WHY REDUCING SPEED MATTERS
Spieker explained that while increasing your speed by 10 kilometres an hour may not feel like a big difference when you’re behind the wheel, for a pedestrian, it’s the difference between life and death.
“When somebody is struck at 40 kilometres an hour, it’s about 50/50 [chance of survival], when somebody is struck at 50 kilometres an hour, it’s closer to a 90 per cent chance of death,” she explained.
“And when you’re struck at 60 kilometres, it’s virtually guaranteed death. That’s only a range over 30 kilometres an hour, from 30 to 60, which isn’t a huge difference for the person behind the wheel, but it means everything to the person that they hit and that person’s family.”
This is why, she says, reducing motor vehicle speeds is a huge component of the Vision Zero Toronto Safety Plan, introduced in 2016 as a means of improving safety on Toronto streets.
“Slowing down motor vehicle traffic means that crashes aren’t fatal. They’re no longer devastating, shattering, life-altering events. They become trivial nuisance events, fender benders at lower speeds.”
This is echoed by Michael Longfield, executive director of advocacy group Cycle Toronto, who says that speed cameras do work.
“Especially in Toronto, we kind of ‘casualize’ speeding and think about it like, ‘What’s the difference if I go 5, 10, 15, 20 [kilometres] over the speed limit? I think it’s really important to know that those additive differences in change of speed, the result of it, in the case of crashes, is exponential,” Longfield told Now Toronto.
He explained that a pedestrian struck by a vehicle going around 50 kilometres an hour has a 40 per cent chance of being killed, while someone struck by a vehicle going around 65 kilometres an hour has a survival rate of just 20 per cent.
“It really gets quite dangerous, very fast.”
ACTIVISTS CALL FOR BETTER INFRASTRUCTURE
While the concept of having a lottery is definitely appealing, activists like Longfield say that infrastructure is what’s most effective for reducing speeding.
“Barring road reconstruction that doesn’t enable people to speed or makes it much more challenging to, because the road itself is designed to not enable it, these cameras are a great stop-gap to help address [the issue].”
“I think what is really working is the punitive nature of people being ticketed for speeding, and us reaffirming as a society that you know speeding is not acceptable, ” he continued.
A study published by SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University earlier this year found that speed cameras reduced the number of speeding vehicles by 45 per cent in urban school zones. The greatest reductions occurred among vehicles with higher speeds, with an 88 per cent drop in cars going faster than the speed limit by 20 km/h or more, according to the study.
Gholizadeh believes that proper road infrastructure is what’s most effective.
“It’s way more effective than just a speed camera, it’s more effective than a speed camera with the jackpot for people to win the speed camera’s earnings,” he explained. “When you design a street to match the speed that you want motorists to go, that’s ultimately the most effective way to address speeding.”
He says that a road like Parkside Dr., with many wide, straight lanes and few traffic lights, is designed in a way that encourages drivers to go fast.
“When you design a street like that, that’s made for higher speeds. That’s made for people to go 60, 70, 80 kilometres per hour on, and then you slap a 40 kilometres per hour speed limit, you’re going to have problems,” Gholizadeh explained.
“Studies have shown that people don’t base their speed on what the sign tells them they should be going. Many people base it on what the road conditions are telling them they should be going, and Parkside road conditions tell them you can go fast.”
He is also exasperated by what he calls a lack of action from the city, especially in light of the introduction of Vision Zero. Gholizadeh shared that three people have been killed in collisions on the street in the past few years alone.
“This is on a street that’s lined with residential homes, that has the city’s busiest park on the other side, and you’re having people being killed as they’re trying to go to the park, as they’re trying to go about their day,” he shared. “It’s just mind-boggling that this has been happening for so long, that the city committed to Vision Zero 10 years ago, and they have yet to take the steps to try to address this issue.”
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