Picture this — $14m windfall for police
TRAFFIC: Photo radar is big business for Winnipeg
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 trafficenforcement 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.
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 city-wide regime of shoddy infrastructure. He has documented speed signs that are non-reflective, obscured by bushes or placed at wildly hard-to-spot 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. 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. 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.
“There certainly is pressure being placed on the police from certain quarters of civic government to come back with certain expectations in terms of funding,” Mike Sutherland, then-president of the Winnipeg Police Association, told the National Post in 2012.
Although Winnipeg denies its officers are being issued with set targets, in its 2014 financial report, Winnipeg Police do bemoan the fact traditional traffic enforcement had “fallen short of budget over the last number of years.”
“Unfortunately, there were too many people speeding through school zones.”
— Scott Gillingham