Bradford to roll with speed cameras past 1-year pilot timeline

Bradford’s speed cameras won’t be speeding off into the sunset anytime soon.

Committee of the whole recommended council approve hiring more staff to help extend the town’s automated speed enforcement (ASE) one-year pilot project beyond its May 1, 2025 deadline, during the regular council meeting on Tuesday evening, Sept. 3.

That decision came in response to a report on the program’s first three months from Brent Lee, director of corporate services, and would allow the town to continue processing penalties issued to speeders by hiring the following:

• one manager of ASE and administrative monetary penalty system (AMPS);
• two provincial offences officers;
• two screening officers; and
• two hearing officers (externally contracted)

“We have an AMPS project in our bylaw enforcement team that desperately requires some logistics and oversight,” Lee said.

While the exact cost of those new hires isn’t included in the report, Lee does note the program’s revenue would cover all the operational expenses while still leaving funds available for other safety programs, such as red-light cameras.

The decision didn’t come easily though, and the use of those funds became the source of debate, with one motion to defer and another to proceed with the new hires both being defeated before an amendment was able to pass.

That came from Ward 4 Coun. Joseph Giordano, who was in favour of the new hires, so long as excess funds were prioritized for engineering physical speed reduction, in accordance with the town’s traffic mitigation strategy, along “key” north-south and east-west corridors such as: Professor Day Drive/Melbourne Drive, Simcoe Road/Barrie Street and Blue Dasher Boulevard/Northgate Drive.

“Just moving cameras around is not enough. We need to actually fix the problems that the cameras are identifying,” he said.

From May to July, the ASE 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, based on updated figures provided by Lee after the meeting.

Lee explained the Ontario Ministry of Transportation requires excess municipal revenue from ASE programs be used to support “a fairly broad scope” of safety and educational initiatives, but Giordano worried that would be too vague.

Ward 2 Coun. Jonathan Scott agreed the money shouldn’t be a “slush fund” for general safety projects when about a dozen streets in town are “perennial issues” and might otherwise always need cameras.

Despite disagreements in some areas, councillors were generally positive about the program overall, with Mayor James Leduc saying he will “100 per cent stand behind” it and Ward 5 Coun. Peter Ferragine pointing to data in the report showing camera locations saw an average decrease in speed of between two and four kilometre per hour, as well as a steady downward trend in the number of vehicles speeding over the 13-week period.

With a posted limit of 40 km/h, Professor Day Drive saw the biggest reductions with the average speed dropping from 49 km/h to 45 km/h and the amount of vehicles ticketed dropping from 5.27 per cent to 1.43 per cent.

“The program is working,” Ferragine said. “If everyone just followed the rules of the road, we wouldn’t need speed cameras.”

Based on that success, Ward 3 Coun. Ben Verkaik suggested it might be better to have more speed cameras, rather than physical measures like speed humps, which impact everyone driving over them, not just speeders.

“I’d like to see a camera at every school and every park, but we probably can’t do that,” he said.

In response to several councillors, Lee clarified that the recommendation wasn’t intended to expand the ASE program — just to continue it past the pilot phase, that ticket revenue has never been a goal for the program, and that camera rotations were planned to test how effective they were in different areas.

“ASE cameras are one solution; they’re not the only solution,” he said.

Another option to continue the program would have been for the town to join an existing joint processing centre along with other municipalities to share costs, but that would result in less autonomy and still require additional staff to assist with screening and hearing reviews. The town has already made “significant investments” in its current system, according to Lee.

Recommendations from committee of the whole are considered for approval at the next regular council meeting.