LILLEY: Olivia Chow's speed camera report full of holes and exaggerations
· Toronto Sun
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Can we talk about that report to Toronto City Hall that Mayor Olivia Chow used to claim that speeding was out of control.
The report, and the way the data is presented, is dodgy at best, relying only on percentages without also presenting the hard numbers.
What’s worse is how Chow is presenting this as a matter of life and death — you support speed cameras or people dying at the hands of out-of-control motorists.
“I’ve said many times, speed kills,” Chow said ahead of Wednesday’s council meeting . “This report that we just got on city council is horrifying.”
To listen to Chow, the entire city is being overtaken by F1 race car drivers whipping around the track while passing by your neighbourhood school.
“People are driving like it’s a highway,” she said. “It’s a school zone for God’s sake. So bring back those speed cameras because this is just inexcusable.”
Chow’s rhetoric doesn’t match reality
Let’s look at what the report actually says and start with one of the few hard data points that isn’t presented as a percentage data point to be blown out of proportion.
The report compared data from locations around the city looking at the speed vehicles were travelling at before and after the speed camera shutdown. They examined 13 locations where the speed limit was 30km/h, 53 locations where the speed limit was 40 km/h, and 38 where the speed limit was 50 km/h.
“Across 104 locations with comparable before-and-after data, the average 85th percentile operating speed increased by 4.8 km/h,” the report read.
Wait?
Chow said people were driving like it was a highway, but the average increase was less than 5 km/h. Meaning that in a 30 zone, people who were speeding were doing on average 35 km/h.
You can do the math on the other zones.
Using exaggerated stats to scare public
So how do we arrive at the idea, widely reported by the media following this story, that there is a 410% increase in big speeding following the removal of speed cameras?
Of the 13 locations where the speed limit is 30 km/h and the city was able to compare before and after data, they found that when speed cameras were active, just 1.4% of all drivers were clocked at speeds 16 km/h or higher than the limit. After the speed cameras were taken out, the city says the percentage of drivers clocked at 16 km/h or over jumped to 7.2%.
The city calculates the increase from 1.4% of drivers to 7.2% of drivers to be a 410% increase and uses that to scare people.
For zones with 50 km/h as the speed limit, Chow says the increase in those going fast is a 480% increase. The actual percentage of drivers going 16 km/h over or more in those zones went from 0.5% to 2.9% and she pulls out the 480% increase figure to scare people.
It’s utter nonsense.
Speed bumps slow emergency vehicles
The mayor pushed back on the call by Premier Doug Ford to install more speed bumps by saying ambulances and fire trucks can’t safely navigate those traffic calming features. That might be a serious argument if Chow didn’t support bike lanes reducing response times for emergency vehicles in areas bike lanes shouldn’t be in just because she likes more bike lanes.
As for the claim that dropping speed cameras causes more deaths, the city’s own report shows that’s not true.
During the period of this study from December 2025 until May 2026, there were 25 fatal collisions and 25 deaths in areas where speed cameras once operated. The report also shows that from December 2021 until May 2022, those same speed camera zones saw 25 fatal collisions and 27 deaths.
No one wants deaths or injuries from vehicle collisions, but Chow is using dodgy stats and fear to sell the public on something that isn’t true.
The entire problem with the way the speed camera operations were set up in Toronto, in Brampton, in Ottawa or Mississauga, is that it was a cash grab. Any safety considerations were secondary to the amount of money municipalities could collect.
Money and not safety is why they set them up and money and not safety is why Chow is fighting to bring them back.