Several city councillors say it's important for the Toronto Police Service (TPS) to 'get to the bottom of' how many automated speeding or red light camera tickets its officers get – and how many have no lawful excuse.
If our own public services do not lead by example when it comes to road safety, then how do we ever expect to have a society without pedestrian injuries/deaths.
Drivers that are employees should be held to a higher standard. This includes transit operators, truck drivers, city workers/services, officers, garbage truck operators, and cab drivers. Safer city streets begin with everyone.
And as a public PSA, the posted limit is the limit, don’t travel above it on streets/roads.
Also small ways you can help that have a big impact. Next time you get in a cab and you see your cab driver is going 5 kmh over the limit, tell them to slow down in your neighborhood. Most cab drivers drive 20kmh over on city streets.
The posted limit is a recomendation, seems most people can get away with 20 over the limit. Starting to feel kinda pointless to even have a limit if it is so loosely enforced.
Agreed the limits on roads do sometimes feel a little loosely enforced and in some cases car traffic just seems to default to the speed of the individual in front of them.
Though the issue IMO is not with the signage itself. The issue really is with the overall design of the roadway. In north america we seem to not have a proper classification in our roadways. Such that everything is either a hwy or a road, or more precisely a “strode”, neither a street or a road.
In actuality we should break these down and standardize layouts/designs beter. For example all roadways should fall into only one of the following categories, going from highest speed to slowest speed.
Hwys 110-90kmh
high speed arterial roads 80-60kmh
city streets 50-40kmh,
suburban/residential 30-20kmh
“Arterial roads are similar to hyws in that there are no driveways in/off them into plazas/malls. They function like a hwy’s but at lower capacity and speed, they may only be one lane or at maximum two.”
When roadways have their speed dropped the roadway should be redesigned to accommodate this posted limit. This includes the narrowing of lanes, the addition of crossways and crosswalks, speed bumps and speed cushions, benches and planters, trees, all this works together to make higher speeds feel “uncomfortable” and thus drives slow down to the new designed speed as opposed to the posted limit.
If instead of signs we limited the comfortable speed of our roads by narrowing them and placing more physical obstructions like chicanes and trees very close to the roadside it would naturally slow people down.
If you drive on a narrow road with a lot of roadside objects you naturally slow down as the risk feels higher and the sense of speed is increased.
If we keep building roads that look like airport runways and drag strips, we can expect this issue to persist.
They had chicanes in my neighbourhood for a couple of decades. They aren’t good in an area that gets snow as the plow will fuck them up, as well as drivers not knowing how to use them and create traffic jams by being idiots. The replaced them with more of the wide speed bumps. They seem to have a better effect at calming the speeds while not causing unnecessary traffic blockages.
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