Amid a push for road safety improvements across Toronto, the implementation of one measure in one particular pocket of the city, an Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) camera in High Park, has been met with somewhat surprising resistance.
An incident this past week is just the latest in a string of attempts to dismantle the camera on Parkside Drive, which is the most lucrative machine of its kind for the City, issuing some $3.6 million in speeding tickets in its first 17 months in operation, and close to $7 million total since spring 2022.
Advocacy group Safe Parkside has now documented at least three recent instances of people knocking over, chopping down or otherwise trying to rid the street bordering High Park of the device. While other ASE cameras have been similarly vandalized over the years, none appear to have been targeted as often as Parkside’s.
Not justifying the vandalism but in an age of micro sized electronics, this country keeps on deploying furniture sized cameras with toothless laws/loose enforcement. What else was expected here ?
— Ishu (@ishwinder) September 10, 2024
This time, someone was so disgruntled about the policing tool that they not only cut it down with some type of saw, but towed it through the adjacent green space and tossed it into a local pond.
In a panicked release on December 30, Safe Parkside wrote that the camera had been “cut down once again, leaving this dangerous street with little in the form of safety.”
“This time the vandalism did not end once the speed camera had been toppled. The speed camera was then dragged through High Park and dumped in the duck pond, where it currently remains,” it continued.
The release also included relevant stats, such as the 65,392 speeding infractions that the machine has caught in its more than 2.5-year tenure, including one offender who was nabbed going a staggering 154 km/h along the 40 km/h north-south thoroughfare.
“Parkside residents continue their call for safety… A speed camera that has recently spent more time on its side or in a pond than it has upright and functioning has clearly fallen well short of addressing the dangerous conditions that persist on Parkside Drive,” the organization notes.
The last time the camera was forcibly removed from service by a member of the public was on November 29, when it was hacked down — an incident that was an exact repeat of one that had happened less than two weeks prior, on November 17.
Back at the end of April, someone spraypainted over the camera’s lenses, prompting dismay within the community — but also, discussion of what else can be done to make the road less deadly.
“The design of the road is part of the problem. I sometimes drive there and have to be on my brakes constantly to stay under 40. Needless to say, everyone else is passing me. They need to get on the physical changes,” one person wrote in response in the Safe Parkside Facebook group.
“It will be nice to have safety improvements that can’t be so easily and frequently thwarted,” another added.
Sentiment regarding the City’s use of the surveillance measure generally has been mixed, with some online even openly referring to the vandals attempting to destroy the machines as “heroes.”
“Vandals”… That is a pretty weird way to spell “heroes”.
— Marcelo Colin (Karim🜏sama) (@MarceloColin6) November 18, 2024
In February, the City also revealed a plan to equip Parkside with separated, two-way cycle tracks in line with its Vision Zero strategy to reduce road fatalities to zero — something that is unlikely to come to fruition as currently designed, given that the Province now has the final say on such infrastructure when it necessitates a loss of mixed-use traffic lanes.
