Speeding is the main cause of death and injury on its roads, but Quebec’s tendency is to tolerate 20 km over the limit and often more. This story delves into the reasons and the consequences.
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Many of the city’s smaller festivals are struggling for funding, governments holding their arts funding at pre‑pandemic levels.
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Nicholas 19:35 on 2023-10-09 Permalink
This is a good article, but nothing new. There is a very low chance of getting caught, and small penalties if you do. There is no social pressure to not speed, if anything the opposite. What is not mentioned is that streets and roads are purposely designed for people to go faster than the limit, so people do. And there is little interest to change any of this, and strong pushback against those who propose it, though that’s slowly getting less worse.
Aineko Marcx 20:28 on 2023-10-09 Permalink
I personally tend to respect speed limits, mainly because speeding is too mainstream.
jeather 20:38 on 2023-10-09 Permalink
FWIW SK/AB friends say that the tolerance is a lot higher there, MB lower. I follow speed limits on streets with sidewalks, but I can’t say that I go at 70 on Decarie — it’s either 90 or 10, depending on traffic (and weather).
steph 22:10 on 2023-10-09 Permalink
There’s no reason why photoradars can’t be placed everywhere. Is there actually reason why we can’t put them ALL over the place?
Ian 22:15 on 2023-10-09 Permalink
I was always told in driving school not to speed if you were alone on the road but on a busy road to match the speed of other drivers even if they were going above the limit, and broadcast your intentions as much as possible, and slow down ad soon as it is safe. In bad weather I’ve seen people on the 40 going 60.
It has always been an “understanding” to allow 120 on a highway but I have never seen more than 5-10 over tolerated by cops in the city – and I have a friend who got ticketed at 105 on the 40 near the end of the month.
The biggest issue is that the cops are inconsistent and people think – correctly- that they can get away with driving at 140 or more on the highway… most of the time.
No point to laws that aren’t enforced.
mare 00:47 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
@steph Don’t you think 7 red light cameras and 7 speed cameras* in the greater Montreal area (population 4M) aren’t enough? It’s a total money grab!
Besides, a Quebec judge ruled earlier this year that camera proof is illegal, there must be a police officer watching the photo radar situation. So I guess we do need more cops. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-photo-radar-1.3874485
(And an unknown number of roving mobile installations.)
H. John 08:36 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
@mare that link is to a 2016 article, not to “earlier this year”.
In the Bove case which the 2016 article refers to, the SQ officer who signed the offence report had not received appropriate training to ensure that the device used to ticket Bove was accurate and couldn’t prove that the device had been inspected by the manufacturer within 75 days of the date it was used. Therefore the offence report was based on hearsay evidence. The clear requirements that the justice of the peace based his decision on were contained in the Highway Code.
Rather than appeal the decision, the government revised how tickets could be issued through photo radar or cameras installed at red lights. The revised legislation was adopted in 2018.
Mr.Chinaski 09:09 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
The next logical step will be cameras that time you from point A to point B, giving you speeding tickets on the interstate when you go too fast. It’s a hundred times more efficient than single-spot cameras.
dhomas 11:32 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
IMO, simple fines are not enough. If you can get away with speeding with only a fine, then that means speeding is legal… for a price. A 100$ fine hurts much more to someone who makes $30K/year than to someone who makes $200K. If we wanted a real deterrent, we would adopt similar penalties as they have in Finland, where the fine is on a sliding scale based on salary. But this would be political suicide for any politician who proposes it (just like bridge tolls, and other things that we all know make sense but collectively don’t want to admit to).
steph 12:07 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
@ mare
> 7 red light cameras and 7 speed cameras* in the greater Montreal area (population 4M) aren’t enough? It’s a total money grab!
Yes, grab the money from the speeders. If they’re profitable, why not? And balloon those fines with a sliding scale!
Ephraim 12:52 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
@steph – Should they do the same thing on some of the bike lanes too? At the traffic lights? Or the pedestrian crosswalks? I have YET to see a single bike stop on St-Denis at the pedestrian walks in the middle of the street, like the one in front of Diese Onze or Diabolik. It’s actually surprising how the culture has changed with the cars stopping for the most part for these crosswalks, which was something they wouldn’t do, years ago.
Ian 13:30 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
I get the feeling that a lot of people interpret the Idaho stop as meaning that stop signs and crosswalks are optional. I’ve seen very similar behaviour on the bike path on Bernard that passes in front of École Lamber-Closse & its crosswalks at St-Urbain and on Waverly.
steph 13:31 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
Impossible to use cameras for cyclists and pedestrians unless you want to open up the can of worms that is facial recognition.
I drive a car. 119 down the highway, I slow down for the cameras, I slow down for cops ahead on radar duty. I slow down for curves (and overpasses) when I’m alone on the road and can’t watch break lights for cops ahead on radar duty. Yet I’ll advocate for more cameras – every 100m on the highway if they’d be profitable.
mare 14:09 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
@H. John
Oops. I had a French article dated January 2023, and missed that it was such an old ruling. Them found an English article on a more reputable website and totally missed that it was old news and they even had changed the law after it. My bad, it was late/early. (I should also not combine sarcastic tongue-in-cheek paragraphs with serious ones.)
DeWolf 14:31 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
@Ian If the Idaho stop was legal and there was education/enforcement around how to do it properly, we’d probably have a lot better behaviour by cyclists. Instead the CSR requires them to come to a complete stop and put their foot on the ground before proceeding, which if you actually do that is not only exhausting, but a good way to get smashed into from behind by a car or another cyclist. The result is that 99.99% of cyclists ignore the nonsensical legal requirement and just do whatever feels appropriate to them. What we really need a complete overhaul of the CSR with a focus on making things safer for pedestrians and cyclists. At the moment is is completely car-centric and everything else is an afterthought.
@Ephraim I always stop for people in crosswalks, and if I can tell there’s another cyclist behind me, I’ll make a hand gesture and position myself in the middle of the path so they can’t get around me. But I admit that there aren’t many other people on bikes who are as conscientious of pedestrian priority. I remember on one occasion on St-Denis, I stopped for a couple crossing the street, and a young French-from-France guy on a Bixi (wearing headphones of course) veered wildly around me, cut off the couple and hurled some continental swears at all of us.
jeather 15:37 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
I do think more cyclists, as a percentage, ignore pedestrian crossings than drivers. But the harm caused by a driver is on average a lot higher and their actions are a lot riskier.
Ian 16:09 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
Nobody’s arguing that cars aren’t inherently more dangerous – but that bicyclists aren’t heroes simply for not driving cars.
If an elderly person, a kid, or a mobility impaired person is knocked down by a bike it can still mean a hospital visit or worse. It does happen.
I’ve also seen lots of cyclists blast through those school crosswalks in front of a crossing guard many, many times, but I’ve never seen a motorist dare to do the same over 15 years of walking kids to school.
Kate 21:32 on 2023-10-10 Permalink
It does happen.
It must happen, but when I asked Dr Patrick Morency, who’s very keen on protecting pedestrians, he said the city keeps no statistics on bicycle‑pedestrian incidents.
Tangentially, the other day I had to get out of the way of a powered scooter on the sidewalk. I assume since these are allowed on bike paths, the driver blithely assumed that since we tolerate bicycles on sidewalks, we should also tolerate his vehicle. He narrowly missed me. (It wasn’t a little powered toy scooter either, but one of the type that looks more like a small motorbike.)
Tim S. 10:35 on 2023-10-11 Permalink
Sometimes, the slippery slope is real. Since cyclists don’t follow many rules, then ebikes don’t have to, then scooters. I haven’t yet seen a full motorcycle go through an intersection on a pedestrian light, but I have seen them help themselves to bike paths.
Back to the original topic, I was pleased to see a full team of three SPVM on traffic duty outside my kid’s school this morning. More of that, please.
jaddle 15:28 on 2023-10-11 Permalink
The sections of the 40 and 20 where the limit is 70 (West of the Decarie) are quite indistinguishable from the the 100km/h sections, and everybody drives accordingly. This morning I was going 90, and was the slowest one that I could see! The slowdowns due to construction are ignored even more, which is alarming.
Orr 14:57 on 2023-10-12 Permalink
Highway speeds are 120 bc graduated speeding fined get a lot more expensive at 30 km/h over the limit. This keep highway speeds to around 120, with trucks at 105. If highway speed limit was raised to 120 then cars would go 140 which is too fast.
The fines/penalties need to be increased for urban areas with 30/40/50 km/h speed limits. Or zero tolerance, but that would require 1) a more efficient and rapid method for spvm to issue speeding tickets and 2) the spvm to care about issuing urban speeding tickets in the first place. Perhaps temporary confiscation of the motor vehicle for a 2nd offence.
Anyone who thinks bicycles ignoring pedestrian crosswalks is THE big problem and not the more likely to break many many bones or kill you cars (cars, pickups, suvs, buses, trucks are the real problem, do I really have to spell it out for you?) ignoring pedestrian crosswalks simply has a hate-on for bikes. Remember that the same idiot-level of driving-safety that you complain about with cyclists is done by car drivers 24/7/365 in our city. Fewer than one-in-ten cars stop at the stop sign on my street, where we had a fatality and have some recently added safety measures after a parent pushing a baby carriage was injured. Yet zero SPVM surveillance here.