As of November 14, 2025 the installation of speed cameras has been banned due to legislation enacted by Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford. The reason for the legislation was to stop Ontario municipalities from using the cameras as a “cash grab”, or a way of generating money for the municipalities rather than for the purpose of improving road safety.
In London Ontario news media reported that seven speed cameras generated $500,000 in ticket revenue in 2024, however the City of London only received $105,000 in its share of that revenue. But no one has been curious enough to ask, who received the other $395,000? What no one wants to talk about is that those speed cameras are owned by an unnamed private firm. And therein lies the problem. Ford appears to have been aware of the money that was being generated from speed cameras or he would not have called them a “cash grab”. But why has so much money been generated? Obviously from motor vehicles being driven over the speed limit.
But no one has asked, and no one has said, what threshold has been set for defining a vehicle as speeding. Is the threshold 2 km/h above the speed limit? Is it 5? Is it 10? It would seem obvious that the lower the threshold the more speeders are found and the more money is generated. So was Premier Ford aware of this? Very likely. And that is why he threw out the baby with the bath water by outlawing speed cameras?
This is a remake of the comedic movie “Dumb and Dumber”. Municipal politicians abuse speed camera procedures and Ford does the dumper thing of removing speed cameras altogether. But this is not a comedy, and it is not funny. The result that these politicians have created is that average citizens will be killed.
Ford’s claim that “traffic calming measures such as speed bumps, raised crosswalks, signage, roundabouts and increased police enforcement” can effectively replace speed cameras is an outright lie. At Gorski Consulting we are aware of that fact because we have conducted detailed studies of how collisions occur, something that few persons done, not even police.
For example speed bumps affect all drivers using a roadway and they are effective is bringing down the average speed on a roadway. And most persons think that reducing the average speed is what is important. But that is not true. What is important is detecting the criminal drivers at the very top of the speeding pyramid. It is the few drivers who travel at very high speeds and have no regard to any meaning of safety that are the true danger. And these drivers will not be stopped or detected by speed bumps. This was made clear a few years ago on Wilson Ave in central west London, Ontario.
On May 29, 2021 an article was posted on the Gorski Consulting website entitled “Speed Bump Aggressiveness As Part Of Collision Cause Analysis”. In that article we described an incident as follows:
“At approximately 0330 hours on Sunday, October 26, 2019, a Mercedes vehicle was northbound on Wilson Ave, just west of downtown in London, Ontario. Upon approaching the T-intersection with Blackfriars Street the vehicle went out of control. It knocked down two utility poles, then struck a commercial building on the west side of Wilson, it was then deflected and impacted a residential house on the opposite side of the T-intersection. News media reporting on the collision described the site as a “war zone”. A woman sleeping in the struck residence was lucky to escape injury as a neighbour reported that ‘Her head was a couple of feet from where the car stopped'”.
This “war zone” was created on a roadway containing four speed bumps. Our further comments in our website article are noted below:
“Further examinations revealed that there were four speed bumps located along the approximate 725 metre length of Wilson Ave from Dundas Street through to Blackfriars Street. It could not be expected that a northbound driver could be oblivious to the presence of all these speed bumps even though some of the warning signs might have been blocked from view. However there was no information made available whether the collision-involved Mercedes travelled the full length of Wilson or if perhaps the vehicle turned onto Wilson from one of the crossroads. Thus it is possible that the driver might have experienced a couple, or even just one of the speed bumps before experiencing the loss of control.”
“There is no question that the collision-involved Mercedes was travelling very quickly, and likely at highway speed along a narrow residential street posted with a maximum speed limit of just 50 km/h. So why did this occur? If the driver was familiar with the roadway then he/she should have been aware of the presence of the speed bumps. And one would expect that any driver would find it uncomfortable to travel over a speed bump at highway speed. Any driver can appreciate that a speed bump is designed to discourage high speeds and that driving over a speed bump at high speed should have a major effect on the motion of the vehicle and its control.”
Premier Ford is informing the public that collisions like these just don’t exist. Or he may say that the speed bumps did their job correctly by causing the offending driver to crash. However this collision could easily have caused a fatality, or more, if there were persons present in the path of the Mercedes when it went out of control.
Speed cameras cannot stop these types of collisions, however they can document a speeding vehicle before a collision is created. A speed camera may not necessarily identify the specific driver doing the speeding but it will identify the vehicle and this is a large step toward identifying the driver. Unless the vehicle has been stolen police can narrow the possibilities of who was driving and that makes a big difference in a police investigation.
It is not clear what the Premier was thinking of when he referred to “raised crosswalks” as being an effective safety technology. Anyone who has substantial experience in collision reconstruction would know that it takes a lot of force to stop or change the direction of a typical motor vehicle that has gone out of control. Much consideration has been taken in collision reconstruction circles whereby we discuss the speed at which a vehicle might mount a typical concrete curb or how much speed is lost by a vehicle striking such a curb. A raised crosswalk is typically a shallow change in elevation which has very little effect on the motion of a heavy vehicle.
And the installation of roundabouts is a Ludacris road safety solution as roundabouts cannot be installed everywhere that there might be a speeding problem. Roundabouts are installed at intersections not in the middle of a long segment of roadway where speeding is often observed.
And finally, the idea that Premier Ford thinks he can simply increase the amount of police enforcement is just juvenile. Increasing police enforcement costs money. It costs money because you have to hire additional police officers so that they can conduct the enforcement. Police forces are already stretched to difficult limits in detailing with major crimes. Is Premier Ford going to remove police investigators of a murder and send them onto the roadside, to stand there for numerous hours, so that a few speeders can be caught?
How did Ontario get to this position where one individual can put the safety of millions of citizens in jeopardy, over such a poorly thought out idea as removing speed cameras throughout Ontario? Any expert with any degree of integrity would state clearly that this is a bad idea. And many have done so. Various individuals and organizations have said so. But, like a runaway railway train, nothing has stopped Premier Ford’s folly.
In our view the solution is clear. Speed cameras must exist on Ontario’s roadways. But they cannot be operated for profit by third party companies who share their profit with a municipality. The threshold for capturing speeding drivers must be set higher than what has been done in the past, even though no one has said what that threshold was and that information has been kept unethically secret. Speed cameras can be used to document drivers who are travelling over a speed limit and that data should be kept to identify drivers who continually travel over the speed limit. Such a data file should be simple to create. Software can be developed to identify those vehicles that continually travel over the speed limit and the owners of those vehicles can be dealt with in the appropriate manner. However ticketing drivers who speed should be done at a higher threshold.
Testing by Gorski Consulting has shown what percentages of speeders travel at 10 or 20 km/h above the speed limit and it is certain that most municipalities have similar data. At most sites the average speed is often 10 km/h above the speed limit. Although this matter has not been thought out, it is possible that thresholds of 20 km/h could be used to ticket drivers in those instances where speed camera data is used. Data from Gorski Consulting studies suggest that these thresholds would capture about the top 10 percent of speeders. This would disqualify a large percentage of the population of speeders from being ticketed. And this would not make a large profit for the companies operating the cameras or for the municipalities where those cameras are used. Municipalities should be combining their resources to purchase and operate their own speed cameras without the involvement of a third party company that is there to generate a profit.
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