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Fresco said:
How am I supposed to get around town quickly at those speed limits?? 🙁
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In a 15-minute neighbourhood, you walk, you cycle, or take the TTC or GO.

See link.

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Last 2 posts are unrealistic in a big city like Toronto, especially in the winter time.
I'll be moving out if thats the plan, and taking all my assets with me
 
Fresco said:
Last 2 posts are unrealistic in a big city like Toronto, especially in the winter time.
I'll be moving out if thats the plan, and taking all my assets with me
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I suppose it depends where you live. I've never owned a car in my 35+ years in Toronto, but I'm downtown. When I need one, I walk over to Hertz.
 
picard102 said:
We don't have 15 min neighbourhoods.
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In the old city of Toronto, old city of York, the old towns and villages of New Toronto, Long Branch, Mimico, Weston, Leaside, and Forest Hill, and the old borough of East York, it is.

By rezoning, allowing for multi-use, multi-level density, and taking priority away from the single-occupant motor vehicle, we could get 15-minute neighbourhoods.
 
Anyway, back to the topic of speed cameras. I loathe these things to the point of individual protest by memorizing their locations and detouring around them. You can't get screwed by speed cameras you never drive past.
  • The city claims to want to get the city moving but how is this possible if everything it's doing is meant to slow everyone down?
  • The vast majority of vehicle-pedestrian/cyclist collisions occur during turns at intersections at relatively low speed and often occur due to inattentiveness or distraction from the pedestrian/cyclist or driver or both: map (turn on speed cameras layer and observe). What the politicians and the media will have you believe is that these collisions are occurring on big, straight, open, and wide stretches of road with long sightlines where there's at least a few metres of separation from the road and the sidewalk. No pedestrians or cyclists are getting hit at 50, 60, or 70 km/h. I've been living in the suburbs my entire life and never once have I felt unsafe or uncomfortable crossing the street or jaywalking with vehicles going past at speeds typical of suburban traffic.
  • Weaving, tailgating, driving under the influence, driving with blinding high beams or headlights and taillights off, and distracted driving are the real problems here but they don't get the attention they deserve because they're tricky to enforce and cost considerable amounts of resources and money. Speed is always going to be the easiest to enforce and blame because all it requires is a stationary, roadside radar device to capture drivers and issue tickets by them simply just driving by. Need more revenue? Want to issue more tickets? Lower the speed limit further and you've moved the goal posts for what now constitutes as "speeding". Add a few speed traps to the bottom of hills to catch even more low-handing fruit.
  • Driving at or slightly above speed limits that were perfectly fine for decades until the far-left woke virtue signalling mob and victim mentality came in within the past 10 or so years is now considered criminal and is demonized. You tell me if speed limits of 50 km/h make sense on huge, wide open thoroughfares with verges like Dixon, Ellesmere, Steeles West, Don Mills, or Lawrence East where the limit was 60 for decades and the 85th percentile was a few km/h over that. Absolutists are so hell-bent on people driving exactly a certain speed and never over; I doubt the vast majority of these people have ever been behind the wheel of a car.
  • Speed cameras do the following: increase city revenue (further taxing the populace), disproportionately affect the poor (fines the wealthy can easily afford to pay), increase frustration (drivers being forced to drive at unnaturally slow speeds, in turn slowing everyone else down), increase surveillance (as if there isn't enuff of it already), deflect responsibility (pedestrians are free to be careless and negligent as the only party that'll suffer financial consequences are drivers), increase government distrust (vandalized cameras) but also provides the government with good PR to those that swallow it up ("we're doing something about it!"), induce anxiety (make people who drive past them question themselves what exact speed they drove past the camera at), and promote distracted driving (instead of focusing on what's on the road ahead, much greater emphasis is being placed on attention to the numbers on one's speedometer).
  • Speed cameras do not: stop actual speeding (as there are no physical barriers or traffic calming measures, if justified, to make driving above a certain speed impossible or difficult, stop drivers on the spot but instead delay the notice of infraction by several weeks, long after the infraction took place, improve driving technique (a bottom up skill-based approach capable of solving many problems), increase safety (speed is rarely the sole or root cause of a crash).
  • The war on the car isn't just a war on the car: its a war on the bus, a war on the semi, and a war on the car. You slow car traffic down, you also slow transit traffic down, you slow freight traffic down - you're slowing everything down. To those who so frequently and strongly suggest road redesign: suburban road redesign is not necessary because it defeats the purpose of their original design - to move, at a decent speed, large amounts of local vehicular traffic of varying size (from cars to buses to semis). Narrow the width of the road or its lanes and larger vehicles will have considerably less room to maneuver and side-swiping will become common.
Notice how they say their goal is to change driver behaviour? The choice of words is deliberate. Behaviour is social conditioning and can be easily influenced as it is an aspect of psychology. Technique on the other hand is a skill which can be trained and improved upon. But the government doesn't want that now does it? It wants to micromanage people's lives. Their go-to solutions to many of society's problems aren’t things that require an investment of resources and money, in this case the bottom-up approach of properly vetting, educating, and training capable and critical thinking soon-to-be drivers...it’s always got to be the top-down approach - measures that influence behaviour, fine and penalize normal, everyday people, and make money.
 
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picard102 said:
Sorry, it's hard to discern if people are joking when they say things like woke.
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Yes, they are walking parodies.

I actually agree with Mr. Roads. We shouldn't be relying on speed cameras to slow down drivers, but rather traffic calming measures.
 
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