Council gets it right on photo radar warnings
But Uber decision a head-scratcher
Edmonton city council is taking two steps forward on photo radar, one step back on mass transit.
On the plus side, we have Coun. Dave Loken, one of the city’s most ardent defenders of photo radar, speaking good sense on the matter — more than any councillor has done before.
At Tuesday’s council meeting, Loken announced: “Photo radar locations will now be posted. So you folks out there who have been letting us know how you feel about photo radar, you will now know where the locations are, so hopefully that’s going to make a difference in slowing everybody down.”
It’s welcome that the municipal government — which used to be utterly secretive about major aspects of photo radar enforcement — is now willing to publish these photo radar locations online. That said, I’m not sure how useful the map will be. It will mainly tell us what we already know: that photo radar is used excessively and almost everywhere in the city.
The city has yet to put out the map, but it has released a list of 126 photo radar locations for this week. Good luck keeping track.
Loken said he’ll push to make the map clearer, with the city updating the photo radar sites in action constantly.
“People should know at any given time at any part of the city where the location is going to be,” he said.
“If that’s not the case, that’s something we have to work on.”
But something else Loken said is the real step forward in bringing more sanity to photo radar enforcement. Photo radar does nothing to get drivers to slow down in the moment, but Loken now proposes to have a warning sign before each photo radar location: “I think we actually need to bring out signs that actually say, ‘Photo radar ahead’ so people know that all the time.” If someone passes a flashing warning sign indicating photo radar ahead and doesn’t hit the brakes, they deserve a ticket.
But the signs should slow almost all drivers. It’s the kind of sound educational and safety measure needed five years ago at the start of the city’s overly punitive photo radar cash grab.
Loken himself has seen the value of better signage, such as the city’s new array of digital speed signs. “I can tell you my own personal driving habits have improved immensely because things are in my face,” he said.
The second major step forward also involves saner photo radar enforcement, this time on arterial road off-ramps. Coun. Bryan Anderson was getting all kinds of angry complaints from folks who were heading off arterial roads onto off-ramps. The gripe was they were getting photo radar tickets for not slowing down fast enough to meet the new speed limit on the off-ramp.
Anderson supports photo radar if the speed limit is appropriate for the road, but he’s against the authorities setting up a photo radar honey pot in a speed transition zone, such as an off-ramp.
“I don’t like cops saying, ‘They just can’t slow down in time here. We’re going to put a photo radar there,’ ” Anderson said.
He checked with the Office of Traffic Safety and was told this indeed was not fair. Action has now been taken.
New black-on-yellow recommended speed signs were recently put on off-ramps, meaning that’s the suggested speed, not the limit, and essentially eliminating photo radar in that spot.
“All is cautionary,” Anderson said of the new signs. “Hey! Slow down!”
And council’s one step back? The city is finally adopting a more rational transit strategy with an emphasis on more costeffective high-volume routes, less emphasis on expensive milk runs though residential neighbourhoods.
But the change could leave stranded folks with mobility issues. Mayor Don Iveson and some other councillors wanted to see if maybe a private operator, such as the Uber ride-sharing company, could be part of the solution in residential neighbourhoods.
I see no issue with private companies being part of a transit strategy if that works best for the public. But council won’t pursue this private avenue, as the vote deadlocked on the matter.
That left a number of councillors bewildered that we wouldn’t even research if a such a partnership made sense.
“For us not to be as informed as possible to figure out how we’re going to solve that problem is mind-boggling. Why wouldn’t we have all the options on the table?” said Coun. Andrew Knack.
Perhaps our next council will have better sense.