Vandals keep damaging Toronto’s speed cameras. This is what advocates say the city should do next

A Toronto speed camera is seen in this undated photo (CTV file photo).

With hundreds of Toronto speed cameras vandalized this year, road safety advocates are sounding the alarm and urging city officials to start redesigning roads rather than relying on automated enforcement.

“The way to make our streets safe has to be by redesigning them,” said Jess Spieker of Friends and Families for Safe Streets. “There’s been a decades long lack of political will to build streets that are safe by design, and so we’ve seen truly shocking amounts of road violence.”

There are currently 150 automated speed cameras in operation in Toronto after the city moved to double the scope of the program earlier this year.

The cameras were responsible for about $40 million in fines last year alone. But they have also have been routinely targeted by vandals and, in some cases, knocked out of service for weeks at a time. Last week, the city said that there have been 325 vandalism reports involving its Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras so far in 2025.

One camera on Parkside Drive has been vandalized five times in the last six months.

Advocates like Spieker, who sustained life-altering injuries after being struck by a motorist a decade ago, tell CTV News Toronto that physical changes such as narrower lanes, bike infrastructure, and complete street redesigns could serve as a much better alternative, especially in the wake of ongoing of vandalism to problem areas like Parkside drive.

“Speed cameras work, but they are a distant second,” said Spieker.

She points to global examples like New York City, where there are more than 2,000 cameras citywide. But even there, Spieker says real success comes from consistent street design that makes speeding physically difficult.

“Road design is the way that cities around the world have eliminated death and severe injury on their streets,” she said.

However, a study by SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University found speed violations dropped significantly in zones monitored by ASE devices—from 60 to 43 per cent in 30 km/h areas.

But vandalism remains widespread, and Premier Doug Ford recently criticized the program as unfair and overly punitive. The programs issues fines to motorists for every kilometre over the speed limit they are caught travelling.

‘You need to reallocate the road space’

Faraz Gholizadeh, co-chair of Safe Parkside, echoed the need for structural change, adding that real solutions don’t require tearing up roads to see a real difference.

“Right now, Parkside, its current design is dominated by motor vehicles. 90 per cent of the street is dedicated exclusively to motor vehicles,” he said. “When you design a street where everything’s geared towards motorists, you’re going to have speeding problems. To fix that, you need to reallocate the road space. You need to make it more equitable, so that other modes of transportation… so that pedestrians aren’t stuck on just a narrow sidewalk,” he said, adding that “It doesn’t require reconstruction.”

The city is pursuing a number of design changes to Parkside Drive, including a 1.9 kilometre two-way bike lane on the west side of the road that would require the removal of a lane of traffic. However, it is unclear what will come of that project given provincial legislation that bars municipalities from removing lanes of traffic for bike lanes without the approval of Queen’s Park.

In the meantime, Toronto will spend over $5 million on the ASE program in 2025 and 2026 alone, with its full contract term with Redflex Traffic Systems to double the number of cameras valued at more than $11 million through 2029.

What can other residents do?

Spieker encourages residents to take action directly: “Contact your city councilor, contact the mayor’s office and demand that they do more to build safe streets.”

That’s something Gholizadeh said he’s been doing for more than a decade in his community.

He explains Safe Parkside only formed after frustrated residents, alarmed by traffic injuries and fatalities, began lobbying for changes. It’s something he plans to continue doing in light of the fifth act of vandalism in just six months.

Spieker says the city’s main problem is that it has not invested enough in physical changes to arterial roads adding that it continues to prioritize driving convenience over safety.

“Complete streets on arterial roads I think is the thing that really needs to be pursued much more strongly than it currently is,” she said.“The next best thing is you narrow the lanes for cars. You install physical barriers between motor vehicles and the people who are riding bikes... so that even if there is a car crash, you don’t see the car launched onto the sidewalk where it kills somebody.”

It should be noted that the city is pursuing design changes to many streets as part of its wider Vision Zero program, which aims to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in Toronto to zero.

In a statement provided to CTV News Toronto on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the city called the automated speed cameras just “one tool” in Toronto’s “Vision Zero toolkit.”

“Alongside ASE cameras, the City is deploying other strategies that help alter driver behaviour and decrease speeds, such as engineering improvements including traffic calming, speed limit reductions, senior, school and community safety zones, the Watch Your Speed Program, driver education and more,” the spokesperson said.