A Letter on Red Light and Speed Cameras

A letter that I recently sent to the Honourable Nina Krieger, Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General. The letter advocates for more red light and speed cameras in the City of Victoria.

Setting the Stage

The recent spate of crashes in Victoria prompted me to write a letter to The Honourable Nina Krieger, Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General in support of red light and speed cameras in Victoria.

For people wanting more information on this issue, I've included some links at the bottom of this post.

If you want to write as well, Minister Krieger's email address is PSSG.Minister@gov.bc.ca.

The Letter

The Honourable Nina Krieger, Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General

Dear Minister,

The City of Victoria is in desperate need of a robust red light and speed camera program. The need has been clear to me for some time, and was only highlighted by the spate of crashes in January that got so much press coverage and led the Victoria Police Department to make the following statement on January 19, 2026:

VicPD is urging the community to take extra care on our roads.

Since January 1, our officers have responded to a cyclist or pedestrian being struck every single day.

To date, this includes 9 pedestrians, 7 cyclists, and 1 person on a scooter.

These are not statistics. These are people - your sister, mother, brother, aunts, kids, colleagues, uncles - all walking to work, cycling to school, crossing the street, or simply moving through our community. Each collision carries the potential for life-altering injury or loss.

Road safety is a shared responsibility. Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians all have a role to play, but those operating vehicles carry a heightened duty of care. A moment of distraction, speed, or impatience can have irreversible consequences.

We are asking the public to slow down, stay alert, and make deliberate, cautious choices behind the wheel. Watch for cyclists. Yield to pedestrians. Put phones away. Take the extra second.

Together, we can prevent these collisions.

Together, we can keep people safe.

That's a powerful statement. It's needed, and appreciated, and, sadly, will not change behaviour. We've had public auto safety campaigns since the turn of the last century. They don't work. Red light and speed cameras do.

As you know, red light and speed cameras have proven themselves over and over again to be effective tools to make our roads safer. San Francisco saw a 72% average reduction in speeding at key camera locations. Other data suggests that speed cameras reduce crashes by up to 50%, and serious or fatal injuries by up to 44%. The province's own website says "The cameras are proven to be effective at reducing side-impact, head-on, and pedestrian crashes." None of this should be surprising, because the data is overwhelming that speed kills people. When people are going too fast, their time to react is lowered, their awareness of their surroundings is reduced, and the inevitable crashes are far more deadly.

I fully support the motion that the City of Victoria council passed in 2023 that called upon the Provincial Government to either "install speed and red light cameras at all locations in Victoria where there were over 20 casualty crashes during 2018-2022” or “allow BC municipalities to install speed and red light cameras at their own cost and collect fines.” I think that's an excellent starting point.

Beyond that, I encourage your ministry to consider red light and speed cameras as an educational tool, and not a way to "punish" the odd mistake or to raise revenue. In an ideal world nobody would speed and the program wouldn't collect any money at all! Towards that end, I suggest that the province move to a broad program with a graduated enforcement mechanism:

• The first one or two violations would generate warnings.
• For a vehicle with no previous violations, after an initial warning subsequent violations for some period (e.g., a week or weeks) would also generate warnings. This would give people time to change their behaviour.
• After the warnings, fines would start low, and then increase by a significant, fixed, percentage (e.g., 50 or 100%) for each subsequent violation. That approach avoids both the equity issue of low-income drivers, and the problem of wealthy drivers ignoring violations.
• Violations would "time out" after a while (e.g., only the last three years of violations are considered).

I strongly believe that the purpose of an enforcement program like this is to prevent injuries and deaths, and that people driving will respond better to warnings backed up by progressive enforcement than they would to punitive fines. The goal is to get habitual speeders to change their behaviour, not to "catch" the odd violation.

Finally, I think the current practice of posting warning signs about speed cameras is wrong for two reasons. First, we want people to slow down and stop for red lights everywhere, not just where there's a camera. Second, our roads already suffer from "signage overload", and when there's too much information to process people driving get distracted. We don't need more signs.

My wife and I are senior citizens who live in the City of Victoria. We use bicycles for pretty much all of our daily trips and, in fact, don't own a car. I also walk a lot (my wife really can't anymore). Victoria's protected cycling network is a huge boon to us, but we still have to cross intersections. When my wife and I are on a bike, or walking on foot, there is nothing protecting us from a crash, and both of us are always aware of our vulnerability. I see people run red lights. I see people make illegal right turns on red. I see people roll through stop signs. I see people speed up to "catch" yellow lights. When riding a bike on side streets, I've been dangerously passed on multiple occasions when I was going the 30 kph speed limit. Recently, a driver turned right in front of me when a light turned green and I was going straight through—I avoided injury because I could tell that she was only looking to the left for cars blowing through the light. Most people driving, like most people walking or cycling, are courteous and safe, but there is a significant minority that are either incompetent or just do not care about the lives and feelings of others.

Victoria is a growing city with constrained geography. Our streets are busy with people walking, people cycling, people taking buses, people working, and people driving. We cannot afford to have people speeding as well.

What's the Point Already

When a person driving a car decides to run a red light or speeds down a narrow city street, they may save a few seconds of travel time, but, as the Victoria police put it, they put their sisters, mothers, brothers, aunts, kids, colleagues, and uncles at risk. People walking, rolling, or cycling are individuals, not statistics.

Also, one of the common themes I'm seeing in letters and in social media is that drivers in Victoria are "frustrated" because of bike lanes (somehow, it always comes back to bike lanes). But other municipalities that have installed speed cameras and therefore track how much speeding is going on, are seeing the same problem. It's clear that Victoria's bike lanes are doing their job of keeping vulnerable road users safer. 

Too many of these crashes are nearly invisible, but, back in July of 2022, a crash at the entrance to the Johnson Street Bridge was recorded by a web cam. I did a fairly detailed analysis of the crash on Twitter (back when I still had an account there), and have expanded on that analysis in another blog post. That post includes a video of the moments leading up to the crash, and includes stills showing the timeline and the multiple vehicles that illegally entered the intersection. Some people will find the images and video intense.

References

Thompson, David. "Time for more red light and speed cameras." Dave Thompson Victoria (blog). July 20, 2025. https://davethompsonvictoria.ca/time-for-more-red-light-and-speed-cameras

"Intersection safety cameras/Statistics," Last updated on May 16, 2025, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-and-cycling/roadsafetybc/intersection-safety-cameras/statistics

Alistair Steele, "Here's the really annoying thing about speed cameras: They work," CBC News, Last Updated March 27, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/annoying-thing-speed-cameras-ottawa-they-work-1.6786951

Alison Jones, "Ontario police chiefs voice support for speed cameras, amid Ford's threats of removal," The Canadian Press, last updated September 18, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-police-chiefs-show-support-for-speed-cameras-1.7637333

Ethan Lang, "Speed cams have cut speeding around Toronto schools nearly in half, new study finds," CBC News, last updated July 25, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/speed-cams-reducing-number-speeding-cars-toronto-school-zones-study-1.7594562

Sean Shapiro, "As a former traffic cop, I see the evidence first-hand – speed cameras aren’t a tax grab, they make cities safer," Special to the Globe and Mail, published September 15, 2025, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/drive/culture/article-as-a-former-traffic-cop-i-see-the-evidence-first-hand-speed-cameras/

Roger Rudick, "Commentary: Speed Cameras are a Good Start for Safe Streets," STREETSBLOG SF, published October 6, 2025, https://sf.streetsblog.org/2025/10/06/commentary-speed-cameras-are-a-good-start-for-safe-streets

Roger Rudick, "SFMTA Speed Camera Data Confirms Epidemic of Reckless Driving," STREETSBLOCK SF, published May 21, 2025, https://sf.streetsblog.org/2025/05/21/sfmta-speed-camera-data-confirms-epidemic-of-reckless-driving

Jeff Bell, "Cyclist struck by truck's rear wheel near Johnson Street Bridge," Times Colonist, published July 6, 2022, https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/cyclist-struck-by-trucks-rear-wheel-near-johnson-street-bridge-5551723