When people are in a hurry, they find other ways and that’s when things get more dangerous.

Can you try explaining this? I’ve reread it and can’t make sense of it. Are you saying that speed cameras INCREASE how much people hurry? I disagree. School safety zones are not big areas - if they’re having a notable impact on your length of drive, that’s weird. Forcing people to go 20km/hr slower through those zones via speed cameras shouldn’t add more than a couple of seconds onto a drive. Even if the zone was a km long, that’s a 30s difference going at 60 vs 40. You’re more likely to be caught at a streetlight longer than that.

So rich people don’t care at all about going fast in those areas - it’s just a fee to go fast to them.

Data isn’t showing that. Data, when released, shows top speeds of ~10km/hr over the limit once cameras have been in place. Demerits can’t be assigned until 15km/hr over.

It’s all measured speed reduction in the camera zones. That doesn’t mean people are driving safer, or slower on average even.

Few months back City of Barrie released some info that showed the reduction in speed was long lasting, well after the removal of the speed cameras. This shows a positive change on drover behaviour, even if it is only for the school zone, that’s a big win in my books.

More use of smaller residential roads that don’t have cameras is probably not safer.

Ignoring the assumption that traffic cameras cause decreases in AADT, when the alternative is people speeding through school zones, yes it is likely much safer. Fewer pedestrians, particularly kids which are notorious for not paying attention and are more likely to wander into lanes, means that it is a net positive for those areas.

Allowing rich people to speed as much as they want and just pay a fee probably isn’t safer either.

Is this any different than it currently is? Definitely isn’t making things worse.

For sure - I know the original intention was to try and bring in specialized workers we don’t have here. But IMO, that encourages wage suppression and hiring from outside rather than training.

Its a useful stopgap tool, but it always should have had a requirement of training an alternate candidate or showing some other longterm solution beyond permanent use of the TFW program.

And, like you said, definitely not intended for its use the way it has been now.

As someone who has studied traffic engineering in school and works in road design, I’d be very curious what studies these were.

Look into it, there’s a heavy increase in collisions where cameras are present.

Only place I’ve seen this data was as an example in school of what not to do - several states had low yellow times (1-2s shorter than Ontario’s), and added red light cameras at large, wide intersections that took longer to cross than the yellow timer, meaning if you entered on a green you could theoretically get hit with a red light violation. But those studies were late 90s, early 00s.

Every piece of data I’ve seen shows either a reduction in speed (even post camera removal), or minimal change after removal.

Note that studies need to reflect current state cameras in Ontario - only allowed to be used in school zones, and need to have signage present indicating their use. They’re not used specifically at intersections.

Additionally, the fees for traffic cameras go back to road redesign budget, which is used (on the projects I’ve worked on) to provide traffic calming measures like narrower lanes, AT facilities, etc. Cameras should be a stop gap measure, and are vastly preferable to an increase in the polices budget to have increased traffic enforcement presence.

I honestly can’t see how people defend the TFW program. It artificially suppresses wages of low-income Canadians and pads the pockets of large corporations.

CAA reports as well as studies conducted of driver behaviour before, during, and after shows that speed cameras do.

I don’t want to balloon cop budget to allow proper enforcement. This is a better route with fines going to something useful

Fair - I agree it should be a faster fine to ticketing timeframe. Personally, I think they should do the one month “warning” tickets mailed out to everyone who speeds, when they first install the camera, followed by fines. Give drivers a chance to change their behaviour before being hit by fines.

But a cop isn’t pulling over every single driver doing 50 in a 40 zone. A ticket camera is hitting all of them. I’d argue that’s far more fair.

Wow.

“Our members are fully committed to the transition of their product portfolios to electrified transportation and this is the future of our sector, however that transition can only happen as quickly as consumers are willing to move.”

How about you actually make an affordable EV (ie actually invest in the manufacturing)? Or remove the barriers preventing BYD and others from offering their 20-30k EVs into this market? Protectionism doesnt do shit for a business that refuses to modernize and accept that their products are a major leading factor of climate change.

Things like this always strike me as the biggest example of why regulation is critical, and those fighting against is are wrong.

If there was no regulations and no government body in charge of these things, the public in the area would be responsible for fixing these orphan wells or risk contamination and dying off, while the company owning them is likely dissolved and gone.

Also side note, but this

“Instead of having these really long-term plans, the industry should be using periods of high prices to clean up and prepare for downturns. And instead they are still sort of assuming that good times will last forever, and planning to have long, long periods of good oil and gas prices,” said Yewchuk.

Sums up the mentality of the oilsands pretty well

I get it makes life harder, and many places do require a car to function. If you are consistently a poor driver, unable to actively think about decisions you are making while operating that vehicle, you need to change your life. Whether that’s job you’re in, where you live, or how you work, that’s up to you. There are plenty of options, just people like to default to the easiest. StatsCan data:

75% of people in GTA commute to work in a car. 85% of those are the only person in their car. Average commute for those drivers is 25.5mins.

Lets take out the transit option, since the system can be shoddy and patched together. There are SO few people who carpool to work. If you work down in the GTA and commute in, odds are there is someone within a short drive of you that also commutes in near to your end point. There are facebook groups that are sadly empty for carpoolers, and there are lots across the city to park in and share the drive. You can split the drive, offer to pay, or come up with another solution not based around transit or other, system setups, and doesn’t involve you driving.

25.5mins at 50km/hr (assuming 0 traffic) is 21km. An e-bike is easily able to commute to and from that daily, and is far less likely to kill someone else.

Both of those are less easy options, and options that make most people uncomfortable, so they default to driving themselves.

That choice is the problem. If you are someone who can provide actual rationale for why those reasons don’t work (those who need to drive their personal vehicle for work, extreme mobility restrictions, extremely irregular schedule, etc), but for the vast majority of officeworkers, there are options they are choosing not to use because they’re less comfortable. So yes, I will fixate on individual choices, especially ones with such life-altering consequences. You can’t change the system if you don’t have more individuals on board to drive those changes and sustain them through carbrained idiots fighting against you.

I appreciate your comment, but disagree with some of your stats/facts.

Revenue from traffic cameras goes to mostly the police, not for making roads safer. Revenue from all of Ontario goes to the City not the police. A quick scan of a few municipalities FAQ indicates the same. Brampton, [Barrie](https://www.barrie.ca/services-payments/transportation-parking/traffic-control/speed-limits-enforcement. That funding is actually used to implement other traffic calming measures to further help reduce accidents and speeding.

As far as safety goes, the data I’ve seen shows they initially work, then only for about 100m. Red light cameras are the same, they create rear end collisions due to unsafe breaking from someone who should have used the orange light, but was afraid of a ticket.

Barrie’s data indicates otherwise, showing a tick up in speed after ASE is removed, but still below the pre-ASE speeds. . I can’t find the staff report detailing exactly what their survey data was, but thats still a serious reduction - generally enough to get us almost to the 45% survival rate.

CAA’s data shows that driver behaviour IS changing, which is good news and provides hope that this might actually improve behaviour.

If you have any other recent data that shows otherwise, I’d be interested in seeing it - everything I’ve seen and was taught in school is that speeding is a behavioural habit, and ticketing/consequences are the easiest method to change that habit. It takes time, but habits can change.

You agree there is a systemic problem and then… … You say it’s an individual one?

Intrinsically, yes. We don’t naturally have the same natural ability to judge our risk compared to, for example, running on uneven ground. The argument that the only reason people speed is because the roads feel like they can go that fast is often brought out, and is one that needs to be debunked. There are many cases where road design contributes to speeding, like stroads where you have a 4x 4m wide lanes in areas that shouldn’t have that much traffic, but generally if you narrow the road to a degree that controls speeding by itself (Typically <3m) you increase risk of accidents, as well as make travel difficult for large vehicles like transport trucks. Narrowing that much is applicable for residential only areas, but not any roads larger than that. Using our ‘feeling’ of what speed we can drive safely at is NOT a good measure for what speed we can actually travel safely at.

People are largely driving with the instincts they learned with training and over time. They’re not actively thinking about the decisions they make most of the time. We can call that a personal failing all we want but that won’t change the result.

Thats the problem. If you’re okay with getting behind the wheel of a 2 ton+ vehicle while not actively thinking about your decisions you shouldn’t be getting behind the wheel. You’re a danger to yourself and those around you. If you kill or seriously injure someone while doing that, you don’t get to shrug off your responsibility and say ‘not my fault, I wasn’t given an opportunity to improve’ or ‘I’m driving how I was taught!’. As an adult, you have a responsibility not to hurt those around you, regardless of how good or bad your parents were at teaching you. Instincts alone are in no way sufficient for driving.

I think we should be having regular driving exams (~5 years), and subsidize drivers ed for all new drivers, but I can’t make the laws, and most people are against that. Systemic change is great, but until that change occurs, the onus is on the individual to be responsible, especially when its something that has such power to wreck lives.

If that was it, only people who break rules would speed. Speeding is a structural problem from the design of cars which accelerate fast and have top speeds as high as double the highest legal died limit, and roads which are designed to be comfortably driven WAY faster than the posted speed limit. Most people speed. The roads are designed for you to speed on. The cars are designed to speed with. Long commutes and traffic to go to an underpaid job mean people are driving at their most frustrated state.

I don’t disagree, but the problem is that people are terrible judges of how fast they can react and terrible judges of risk. Tailgating is a major cause of vehicle accidents, and is purely an individual failing. Leaving enough space between the car in front of you and yourself (a well known guideline of 3s in clear weather) is your responsibility and yours alone. Don’t care if you’re tired, angry, emotional, whatever. If you are getting behind the wheel of a 2+ tonne machine, you need to be responsible for that. Unfortunately most people aren’t.

We can argue and disagree on the factors at play, but fundamentally, I don’t agree with your thought process where ALL responsibility is offloaded from the individual to a large, faceless entity of ‘society’. For sure, many people are not being set up to succeed and be safe while driving, and most shouldn’t need to drive at all. I agree - push more bike lanes, push more transit, get trains to actually run alongside major highways to remove single-car commuting vehicles that destroy our environment.

But how can you be claiming that any action taken to slow the deaths and injuries happening by enforcing speed limits is counterproductive action?

40% of speeding drivers involved in fatal crashes are 16-24 years old. 75% of pedestrian fatalities occured on urban, high density roads like those Ontario is in the middle of putting speeding cameras onto. When you consider that pedestrians hit at ~30km/hr has a 5% chance of death, while those hit at 45km/hr has a 45%, and those hit at 60km/hr are at 85% chance of death, there is a very serious argument to be made to enforce 40 and 50km/hr speed limits. By slowing people from 70km/hr to 50km/hr, we can drastically improve the safety of pedestrians and cyclists using the road or sidewalks. In community safety zones with 40km/hr speed limits, enforcing them can increase chance of survival by 40%. Add into that the enormous benefit we would see from a healthcare standpoint when you no longer need to provide care (or provide as serious of care) for accident victims?

How can you be arguing AGAINST speed cameras instead of calling for their implementation everywhere and demanding that funding be reallocated for decarbonization and street redesign? The funding those can pull in is enormous, and as compliance increases, street reconstruction can provide the further increase in fatality reduction.

https://www.radarsign.com/traffic-calming-stats/ https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811090

As people have commented on all these posts since the incident appeared, we have no info on the incident.

Could be evidence of assault above and beyond that required for self defense (injuries to the intruders back, for example, from him attempting to run away, or signs of the fight continuing from inside to the exterior). Generally self defense is accepted with a good degree of latitude in Canada/(would love to find any examples of cases where someone defended themselves appropriately yet were convicted) , but obvious attacks that aren’t self defense still are assault.

Anecdotally, I work for a consulting firm that verifies the development designs on behalf of the municipalities just north of GTA.

At least four big (<1000acre sites) developments have all been paused indefinitely due to the house prices decreasing. Big developers - TACC, Madison, Wynstar.

Almost like Fords pushes aren’t the things needed to get construction done

And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.

Civil engineer who works with municipalities on repairing pipe infrastrucure. I’m in Canada, so YMMV, but they’re ON it with leaking pipes. We’re typically brought in to design new watermains when the old ones reach ~5-10% leakage.

If you don’t like anecdotal evidence, here’s a paper from 2000- This was at the start of when municipalities began examining for this, and even then they only found losses of 20-30%. A personal reduction of 20-30% isn’t that hard.

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2008/nrc-cnrc/NR25-2-40E.pdf

I try to look past party and focus on the policy by itself - in this case I agree. If the EVs can meet Canadian safety standards, let them in. The cost of EVs is the biggest factor preventing their widespread adoption.

Wow, I didn’t hear that’s all they agreed to. There must be other benefits CUPE got, because that’s what AC was offering BEFORE the strike…

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/what-is-ground-pay-1.7611420

Depends - the area you see as vacation property is an area that people live in, unless its on seasonal roads only, or water access only.

I live in an area where vacationers from a big city come out and cottage here. Often its a family cottage they’ve been coming to for decades, so I don’t really have a problems with them renting.

But through covid tons of people from the city bought cottages and drove homeowning out of the grasp of any locals. These are full, four season structures on roads serviced by the township. The average housing price ~doubled, and most locals can’t buy.

If people aren’t using the cottage so often that they can rent it out regularly, then I don’t have a problem with them having to give it up or be more heavily regulated.

Guessing its the extra inspections/requirements for these rentals to meet codes that he’s grumbling about - a likely sign his septic is undersized, or there’s a safety concern that would be expensive to fix.