Pump the brakes, because automated speed enforcement could be coming to Collingwood.
At Collingwood council’s committee of the whole meeting on Nov. 18, Coun. Kathy Jeffery put forward a notice of motion to call on town staff to facilitate a presentation on a future automated speed enforcement program for the town no later than Jan. 31, 2025.
“We’re getting a lot of pressure from our residents about the amount of speeding that’s occurring,” said Jeffery. “I think it would be prudent for us to look at the models available to see if there’s something we could be moving on sooner rather than later.”
The motion calls on the presentation to be made available to council before Jan. 31 of next year, to help inform any decisions council will make out of the town’s Master Mobility and Transportation Plan which is also expected to come before council in January.
The motion notes that the Collingwood OPP Detachment Board (then the Collingwood Police Services Board) had completed a cursory review of the idea pre-COVID, however at that time automated speed enforcement was deemed financially prohibitive.
However, a lot has changed since COVID, and other municipalities in Simcoe County have since jumped on the automated-speed-enforcement bandwagon, such as Essa Township and Bradford West Gwillimbury.
In Bradford, their one-year pilot project with Global Traffic Solutions started this past May with four cameras placed in different locations operated remotely, to automatically detect and photograph vehicles exceeding the speed limit so tickets could be issued to the owners by mail. The cameras are battery-operated and can be operated out of various roadside boxes or mounted to posts or poles.
From May to July, the program issued 16,126 tickets from its four cameras. This resulted in roughly $1.88 million worth of penalties, from which about $289,000 was paid to the province and almost $738,000 paid in other expenses (including but not limited to the confidential vendor charge), leaving the town with about $851,380 in estimated net profit in that three-month period alone.
“I think a comparison of the opportunities for us... (this could help) put funding toward our traffic-calming initiatives,” said Jeffery.
Councillors will consider Jeffery’s motion at their next regular meeting on Dec. 2.
With files from Michael Owen.
