City should use cameras to move traffic

There have been a lot of bad stories about Toronto drivers lately.

- MATT ELLIOTT

They’ve killed cyclists. They’ve run down pedestrians at pedestrian crossovers. They’ve ignored transit lanes and blocked intersections and somehow gone the wrong way down highway off-ramps.

But there is some good news amidst all this bad behaviour: it turns out there’s a ridiculously simple and obvious thing that would help stop it.

It’s cameras. The answer is cameras.

Lots and lots of automated enforcement cameras.

When it comes to traffic enforcement, the data suggests automated cameras are much more efficient and much more effective at catching bad behaviour than police officers.

That’s likely to be especially true in our city, where some police officers seem to regard traffic enforcement as an unwanted chore. In an article last week by the Star’s Mahdis Habibinia about drivers who get away with “blocking the box” — stopping in the middle of an intersection during a red light — former Toronto police officer Matthew Wood said there’s a culture amongst officers that prefers “action-oriented, high-adrenalin, high-octane” calls and does not consider issuing traffic tickets to be “real police work.”

Acting Supt. Matt Moyer, the head of the Toronto police Traffic Services unit, also pumped the brakes on the idea of a police crackdown of drivers who block the box. He noted that the police generally need to block a lane of traffic for an extended period while pulling over a driver to issue a ticket, so a crackdown may not actually improve traffic conditions.