Abstract Manager

Automated speed enforcement (ASE) has been successful in reducing speeds in community safety zones (CSZ) across Toronto.  As part of Provincial regulations, ASE can only be used where there is a community safety zone in place.  During the initial ASE rollout, Toronto allowed community safety zones to be established in existing school zones.  Since then, Toronto City Council directed staff to develop a framework to expand community safety zones beyond just school zones to include other areas. 

Toronto has been progressively addressing vision zero issues, but with over 5,600 km of streets, only so much can be completed at a time.  In the interim, ASE and traffic calming measures are being used to address some speed management issues. While traffic calming methods such as speed humps and cushions on local and collector roadways and speed bumps in laneways are effective, where speed is an issue, arterials have limited options for speed management barring redesign of the roadway. 

Considerations in expanding the Community Safety Zone criteria included focusing on the populations most at risk; pedestrians, school age children, cyclists and seniors. Followed by a jurisdictional scan and internal policy review ensuring the Community Safety Zone criteria aligns with other speed management policies in Toronto. This led to a three-step approach to determine which roads have higher concentrations of vulnerable road users, determine the feasibility of automated speed enforcement, and evaluate locations for safety issues and prioritisation.

A GIS tool was used to identify Major, Minor and high-volume collector roads, road segments close to school crossing guard locations, senior safety zones, retirement facilities, non-separated bike lanes, city run community centres, parks with high visitor volumes, and near hospitals.   This identified over 500km of roadway that could be considered for a Community Safety Zone.  From there, on-site audits will be completed to evaluate the locations to determine if they are suitable for ASE equipment.  If locations pass the site audit, they will go through the prioritisation and safety review process and be added to the ASE location list to be installed on a rotating basis.  This data driven approach identifies roads with the highest number of vulnerable populations and the prioritisation process ensures the areas with the greatest speed management issues are installed first.