Evidently, there’s no hurry to lower Barrie’s speed limit.
On Monday night, city councillors decided the midnight hour was too late for debate and slammed the brakes on a motion to reduce the speed limit by 10 kilometres an hour, deferring it instead to a later date.
“We might not have the best debate and outcome on the speed limit item tonight (by) debating it after midnight,” Mayor Jeff Lehman said. “We might choose to defer that item, by one cycle, and we can pick it up again in three weeks.”
A motion to have operations and development services department staff investigate the feasibility of lowering speed limits across the city, including the cost of replacing signs, and report back before next year’s budget talks, was deferred until the April 19 general committee meeting.
Coun. Keenan Aylwin, the motion’s sponsor, has noted the World Health Organization says pedestrians have a 90 per cent survival rate when struck by a vehicle travelling at 30 km/h or slower.
Coun. Mike McCann has questioned whether lowering the speed limit is what city drivers want, and whether it’s effective. He pointed to an informal 2018 survey that found approximately 70 per cent of respondents didn’t want the speed limit lowered by 10 km/h.
McCann has said city staff would need to come back and say lowering speed limits would make the streets safer in order for him to support the reduction.
Barrie city police have said public and traffic safety are its priorities, and police support initiatives that promote these core functions.
Speeding statistics for Barrie are not available because city police records group all Provincial Offence Notices for Highway Traffic Act violations and don’t differentiate which section of the Act was violated, according to police.
Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act (HTA) sets a default municipal speed limit of 50 km/h on streets within cities and other municipalities. But the HTA grants the city authority to set speed limits ranging from 40 to 80 km/h, in 10 km/h intervals.
The speed limit on most Barrie streets is 50 km/h, although it’s 60 km/h on some roads and 40 km/h in community safety zones at select times of day.
The city has a number of measures to limit speeds in Barrie, aside from city police enforcement. Each ward has speed bumps placed strategically to slow traffic, for example.
Last December, council passed a motion asking operations department staff to advise Toronto’s Joint Processing Centre that Barrie seeks to participate in the Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) program. It is a system that uses a camera and a speed measurement device to detect and capture images of vehicles travelling faster than the posted speed limit and is effective in reducing collisions in school and community safety zones.
Staff recommended a pilot program of two mobile cameras at an approximate cost of $70,000 to $80,000 annually. Implementing the ASE program could take as long as two years, or even longer, because of the number of steps in the process.
