TRAFFIC TICKET CENTRAL
Winnipeg drivers hit hard by fines
School zones where there are no schools. Construction zones where there is no construction. And an entire city plagued by hundreds of broken, missing and hidden speed signs.
As the Winnipeg Police Service toasts a record- breaking $ 14 million in photo- radar fines for 2014, a diehard band of local activists is arguing it is merely the latest mark of a city gone mad with traffic tickets.
“There’s no way it’s accidental,” said Chris Sweryda, researcher for Wise Up Winnipeg, a group dedicated to opposing what they call the “deliberate deception” of the city’s traffic- enforcement program.
Photo- radar revenue topped $ 14.6 million in 2014, according to a new financial report by the Winnipeg Police. It represents a dramatic increase of 25 per cent over 2013, and is the equivalent of a $ 22 ticket issued to every man, woman and child in Winnipeg.
Winnipeg also took in $ 4.5 million in traditional, non- photo- radar traffic tickets.
Last year was the first in which Winnipeg school zones dropped to 30 km/ h, and in which speed fines doubled in construction zones. In comments to local media, city officials blamed the “behaviour of drivers” for the unexpected rise in traffic fines.
“Unfortunately, there were too many people speeding through school zones,” Coun. Scott Gillingham, chairman of the Winnipeg police board, told Global News this week.
Sweryda, who for years has maintained a near- obsessive vigil of the Manitoba capital’s traffic infrastructure, said that thousands of drivers are being unwittingly duped into photo- radar violations by a citywide regime of shoddy infrastructure.
He’s documented speed signs that are non- reflective, obscured by bushes or placed at wildly hardtospot locations, such as five metres up a pole or on a patch of grass more than 11 metres away from the roadway.
In one 2012 count, Sweryda found more than 200 missing school- zone signs.
He has also parsed the regulations on construction- zone signage and photographed construction zones where signs were either missing or tipped over and frozen to the ground, giving drivers almost no warning to slow down.
“They’re catching people that have no idea they’re in a construction zone,” he said.
Meanwhile, in parts of downtown, abandoned orange signs loom over sections of road long devoid of construction.
Sweryda has also delved into city reports and found that speed limits are kept low in defiance of engineering studies. City- commissioned traffic reports, for instance, found that two busy thoroughfares should be signed at 60 km/ h.
They have nevertheless remained at 50 km/ h — and have subsequently become “ticket hot spots.”
“The real scandal is that the legal speed limit has been set far too low, leading to annoying and inappropriate enforcement,” wrote Ted Clarke, the city’s former director of streets and transportation, in a 2011 letter to the Winnipeg Free Press.
The suspiciously high level of ticketing has been noticed by plenty of others Winnipeggers, leading to accusations that the city’s police are under city- hall pressure to meet ticket quotas.