In Ontario, speed cameras are an incendiary topic. They’ve sparked fiery Reddit threads and elicited acts of vandalism: one such device in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood was cut down seven times in less than a year. The provincial government is poised to table a bill banning speed cameras, which Premier Doug Ford has recently denounced as a municipal cash grab, fuelling further public debate. (Legislation to use the devices was passed by the Ford government in 2019; the proposed ban would be a sharp policy reversal reminiscent of Ontario’s short-lived photo radar initiative in the 1990s.)
Proponents of speed cameras say they help prevent road collisions and save lives, often citing a widely referenced SickKids Hospital study about their effectiveness, which found that they reduced speeding in urban school zones by 45 per cent. Critics contend that the devices excessively penalize drivers and divert attention from larger issues, such as how road design shapes driver behaviour.
Globally, a staggering 1.2 million people die from traffic accidents every year, according to the United Nations. More than one in four fatalities involve pedestrians or cyclists. In Canada, the share is even higher: nearly half of road-collision deaths are pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists, government data shows. Nationwide, speeding is blamed for one quarter of road deaths annually.
The sobering data reflects a familiar tension. Around the world, motorists, pedestrians and cyclists vie for limited space in increasingly dense cities, where commuting can quickly turn hazardous. The challenge for municipalities is how to identify and implement effective interventions that can flag and mitigate risks before they materialize.
Safety by design
In earlier statements about the ban, Ford suggested alternatives including simple physical obstacles and visual cues, such as speed bumps, raised crosswalks and curb extensions. The province plans to install large signs with flashing lights in key areas by September 2026.
These measures are in line with the Safe System approach, which has gained traction over the past two decades. Its premise is simple: human error is inevitable. A departure from traditional road safety efforts, which involved more active interventions (such as sobriety checkpoints), this framework shifts the focus to “self-enforcing” road designs (like roundabouts) to encourage safer behaviour. As researchers at Johns Hopkins University noted in a 2023 paper, the recalibration involves asking not “how can people use the transportation system more safely?” but rather “how can the system be made safe for people to use?”
Tools such as fixed traffic signals (and speed cameras) can be part of this approach. Toronto-based traffic signal manufacturer Fortran has seen more than 900 of its flashing beacons installed at busy intersections and in designated school safety zones across the city.
“Anytime a pedestrian is detected, the beacon can be activated so that someone knows, ‘Hey it’s 3:30 p.m., kids are getting out of school — you’ve got to slow down,’ ” says the company’s executive director Aaron Lengyel.
Recently, flashing beacon data has been integrated into Waze, the navigation app that provides real-time traffic updates. Lengyel says this adds an extra layer of warning, which helps drivers stay alert to pedestrians and cyclists nearby.
The effectiveness of the Safe System approach can vary by region: in Norway, for instance, scholars found that it helped reduce traffic deaths and injuries, while traffic warning signs intended to deter crashes have had the opposite effect in Texas. Still, research has shown that specific interventions can work. A 2024 study by the Minnesota Department of Transportation found that the flashing beacon system installation resulted in a 67 per cent decrease in fatal collisions and a 62 per cent drop in cyclist crashes. These fixtures represent a fast-growing segment of the global road safety market, now estimated at $7 billion (U.S.) and projected to reach $12 billion (U.S.) by 2030.
Lengyel anticipates a time when smart technologies are integrated to the point where they mitigate the risk of human error — and actively respond to protect the humans trying to navigate our streets. “All this is a push toward more intelligent intersections that can change dynamically based on how many pedestrians and vehicles are there,” he says.
Strategic surveillance
Fatality statistics tell only part of the story. They leave out another critical measure of road safety: near misses — like the close call that avid biker Calvin Kuo experienced two months ago. While cycling near Toronto’s Kensington Market, he swerved violently to dodge a turning car and flew off his bike, landing just three feet from the vehicle. “I assumed the driver would slow down before turning, but he didn’t,” says Kuo, who was fortunate enough to get away with just a sore shoulder (and an apology from the driver).
Traditionally, efforts to improve road safety might involve reviewing crash data collected over the course of a decade, says Kurtis McBride, CEO of Miovision, a Kitchener-based transportation technology firm. Miovision is taking a different tack. The company’s AI-enabled camera system can monitor intersections 24/7 — tracking speed, vehicle types and traffic volumes — to capture close calls like Kuo’s, which would otherwise fall through the cracks of official crash data.
“By building statistics about near misses, we can get to an actionable insight that helps us deploy a countermeasure like adjusting signal timing or changing something physical about the intersection,” McBride explains. “That way, we can hopefully avoid the crash before it happens.”
In a recent pilot in Bellingham, Wash., Miovision’s camera technology flagged a high-risk manoeuvre at a local intersection: drivers making “right-hook” turns into an intersection with a signal-equipped crossing for pedestrians and cyclists. This move accounted for more than 31 per cent of all recorded close calls involving bikes and cars. Equipped with that data, local planners reconfigured the road to improve bike-lane visibility, leading to a 31 per cent increase in cyclist activity and safer conditions for pedestrians.
Traffic cameras, it turns out, can be more than an enforcement tool. Miovision’s technology, as McBride puts it, is like the “smartphone of the intersection” — a powerful device that distils complex data to inform urban planning and, ultimately, make roads safer.
Leading lights
Road illumination is another critical component of road safety. In the U.S., 79 per cent of pedestrian road deaths recorded in 2022 occurred at night. And an analysis of 763,000 road injury incidents on unlit roads in the Netherlands between 1987 and 2006 showed that street lighting could have halved the number of accidents.
Halifax-based Liveable Cities has helped keep roads bright in more than 60 countries worldwide. But the company’s solutions are more than just LED street lights: Many of its products are fitted with sensors that can collect real-time traffic data. They track roadway conditions, including vehicle speed, and generate data that allows urban planners to tackle speeding more proactively and efficiently.
“We call it targeted speed enforcement,” says Jeff Libis, vice-president of sales and marketing at Liveable Cities. The sensors, he explains, are not costly to maintain and can be easily mounted on a street light — whether at an intersection or along a mid-block stretch. And the devices are portable, which means they can be repositioned in different locations as needed. In 2020, the company’s technology was deployed in Saint John, N.B., as part of a traffic-management pilot program.
Liveable Cities is also testing systems that automatically adjust lighting levels based on traffic flow to conserve energy without compromising safety — that’s in addition to the eco benefits of the company’s existing technology, which it claims is 60 per cent more efficient than conventional lighting.
Municipalities are experimenting with similar technologies. In Quebec, the city of Brossard briefly tested a smart traffic light system that changed colours depending on the speed of an approaching vehicle. Intelligent lighting systems can be found in countries from France to China, part of a global push to harness emerging technologies to improve road safety.
Future street lighting systems might have communications and sensors on board, “all buttoned up inside — similar to a smartphone,” says Libis. By turning ordinary street lights into data hubs, he adds, urban planners can test, refine and validate interventions that will make roads safer — one traffic light at a time.
Owen Guo writes about technology for MaRS. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.
