A simple and urgent call to action – restore the speed camera on King Edward

By Stéphanie Plante, Councillor for Ward 12 (Rideau-Vanier)

On January 13, more than 100 people packed into the Sandy Hill Community Centre to talk about the future of neighbourhood policing in Ottawa for the Community Safety and Well-Being consultations. The meetings, held with the Ottawa Police Service and community partners, focused on upstream prevention, risk intervention, and what effective policing should look like at the neighbourhood level.

While these conversations and meetings are important, they also expose a contradiction that cities across Ontario are being forced to live with. The provincial government wants us to discuss prevention and safety, but then it swoops in and removes very effective tools already in place to do exactly that. 

In 2025, the speed camera on King Edward Avenue in Ward 12 was the highest-performing photo radar camera in Ottawa and had been for several years. That is not because residents in Lowertown are reckless. In fact, most people in Ward 12 don’t own a car. It is because King Edward is a high-volume, high-risk corridor where pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, large trucks, and drivers intersect every minute of every day. The data told us exactly what the risk was, and the camera worked as intended – it slowed traffic and impacted behaviour.

But in October 2025, the Ford Government decided to pull speed cameras across the province. Municipalities and communities were not consulted about this decision. It was imposed by the province. Local data, local safety plans, and local realities were sidelined in favour of a political narrative that framed automated enforcement as unfair or punitive rather than what it is – a public safety tool.

Predictably, after the cameras were removed, speeding increased, not just in Ottawa, but across the province. That should surprise no one. Decades of research show that speed cameras reduce average speeds, lower the number of serious collisions, and save lives. They do this quietly, consistently, and without bias. They don’t rely on discretion. They don’t escalate encounters. They don’t pull police away from more urgent calls.

And police cannot monitor traffic 24/7. That is not a criticism of policing. It is a reality of capacity. Even the most robust neighbourhood policing model cannot place officers on every arterial road, every hour of the day. Cameras filled that gap.

What is worse is that current provincial legislation does not even allow municipalities to use those cameras as passive monitoring tools. Cities cannot collect continuous speed data to understand where risks are increasing. We are being told to manage road safety while being stripped of the ability to measure it.

This is how we end up with residents organizing “speed gun parties” to collect data themselves. On January 16, I joined members of the Lowertown Community Association, Vision Zero Ottawa, and Bike Ottawa on the corner of King Edward and St. Andrew Street to collect data from passing cars and trucks to see if they were following the speed limit using radar guns provided by Vision Zero. There was media on hand who interviewed the participants and we had signs that encouraged the commuters to slow down. 

While the mood was festive, we should not have to be standing on sidewalks trying to fill a gap left by higher levels of government. It is civic-minded, yes, but it is also a sign of system failure. Road safety should not depend on volunteer capacity or neighbourhood privilege. The majority of residents in Lowertown do not have the time to participate in these activities.

The call to action is simple and urgent. The province must restore automated speed enforcement and give municipalities the authority to use it, including the ability to collect and analyze speed data. You can find out more about Vision Zero Ottawa here: https://visionzeroottawa.ca

To talk about this or other issues with me, check my website for a full list of dates and locations for Ward Hours 2026 where I will be dropping into small businesses across the ward from 2 – 4 pm every other Friday afternoon. Locations in Lowertown include the Orange Turtle Bakery on March 27th, Happy Goat Rideau on May 8th, and Oh So Good on June 5th.