Automated speed-enforcement cameras are no more, which Greater Sudbury Police Service board chair Gerry Lougheed called “one of the dumbest things.”
Between the moment they became active on March 22, 2024, to the end of the year, the city’s six automated speed-enforcement cameras resulted in the issuance of 12,796 tickets.
Last year, Greater Sudbury police officers issued 868 speeding tickets, fewer than three per day.
On automated speed-enforcement cameras issuing so many tickets, Lougheed said, “It’s pretty obvious there’s a lot of speeding going on and people need to slow down.”
As for police issuing so few in comparison, he said, “when we have a traffic cop with a cruiser at the side of the road, they can only take so many vehicles to the side of the road, can only give so many tickets and be there for so long.”
Killing the cameras “is craziness, absolute craziness," Lougheed told the finance and administration committee of city council on Wednesday night. “The people who complained the most were the ones who got the speeding tickets.”
Sudbury.com followed up with both Lougheed and GSPS on Thursday to expand on these points, the day before speed cameras were officially prohibited by provincial legislation.
“My partner got two tickets, and she said, ‘Oh, it’s a tax grab,’ I said, ‘No, Louise, you were going over the limit,’” Lougheed told city council members on Wednesday.
On this front, he told Sudbury.com that the speed cameras’ grace period was 11 km/h, meaning only those who were travelling at least 12 km/h over the posted speed limit received tickets.
The police board sent a letter to the province urging them to reconsider a speed camera ban in September, while city council members joined broader-reaching advocacy groups such as the Association of Municipalities of Ontario in sharing a similar sentiment.
“Inevitably, it seems the people who got tickets were the ones complaining,” he said.
Although there’s some legitimacy to the idea that people slowed down in close proximity to speed cameras and then sped up again, Lougheed said there should at the very least be speed cameras in school and construction zones.
“That, in itself, would validate why they should be in existence, because we should all slow down in school zones and construction zones,” Lougheed said.
(Data shows that although drivers sped up a bit after they passed speed cameras, their 85th percentile speeds still decreased by an average of 11 per cent downstream of speed cameras compared to pre-camera speeds.)
Now that automated speed enforcement cameras are a thing of the past, speed limit enforcement is taking a step back toward police-led enforcement, Lougheed said.
“If we don’t have the assistance of technology it goes back to human resources,” he said, adding that the automated speed cameras freed police up for other priorities, like “homelessness, trespassing and drug dealing.”
For their part, GSPS is asking residents to report instances of speeding.
“Thus far in 2025, we have received over 3,000 traffic complaints through online reporting and the 911 Emergency Communications Centre where close to 500 of the complaints are related to speeding,” a GSPS spokesperson said.
“Members of our Integrated Traffic Safety Unit use this information to conduct targeted, focused patrols in high complaint, high traffic areas. We remain committed to targeted enforcement and we will continue to work with our community partners and community members to address the areas and issues of concern.”
Lougheed echoed this sentiment in conversation with Sudbury.com, noting that it helps prioritize police actions.
“I’m sure the councillors in those various wards would very much appreciate people reporting speeding and people breaking the law, because it brings attention to the need for policing in their wards,” he said.
This week, the province announced a $210-million Road Safety Initiatives Fund to support “increased road safety in school zones and community safety zones without using speed cameras that make life more expensive for drivers and taxpayers.”
This will include such things as traffic calming infrastructure like speed bumps, roundabouts, high-visibility signs and increased police enforcement in school and community safety zones where municipal speed cameras were previously deployed.”
Ward 9 Coun. Deb McIntosh, who helped champion the city's adoption and has remained an outspoken proponent, noted that the province's $210-million pledge is being funded by the very taxpayers the province has pledged to protect by removing cameras.
With the revenue-generating cameras gone, she said the city's other option when it comes to speed-limit enforcement is police, who make more than $100,000 per year, plus the cost of their vehicle and equipment.
There's also the question of what strings the province ends up attaching to the Road Safety Initiatives Fund, McIntosh said, noting the province has focused a lot of their attention on school zones in their public comments.
The city has "a long list of roads" the public wants traffic calming on, she said, adding that children aren't just on rodways in close proximity to schools.
“They’re travelling on residential streets which should be safe to ride their bikes on, yet we have people who treat the posted speed limit like a suggestion," she said.
McIntosh also questions the merits of the province's push for more road signs.
“If signs worked, we wouldn’t have collected any money on the (automated speed enforcement cameras), because there were signs indicating they were there," she said.
Sudbury.com asked Ministry of Transportation communications staff how they square their claim they are “protecting taxpayers by banning municipal speed cameras,” when they’ve shifted the financial burden of funding traffic-calming infrastructure from those who exceed the speed limit to the general tax base instead.
(While this isn’t the case in every municipality, Greater Sudbury city council earmarked all speed camera revenue toward traffic-calming efforts. Last year’s net municipal revenue was $753,003.)
As it relates to the $210-million Road Safety Initiatives Fund, we also asked if there’s a limit to how much each municipality can apply for.
Their written response did not address these questions in a meaningful way, and instead reiterated the contents of an earlier media release.
Attributed to Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria director of media relations Dakota Brasier, their full statement read: “We’re investing $210 million to improve safety in school zones and community safety zones without relying on speed cameras that make life more expensive for drivers and taxpayers. This fund supports practical and enduring traffic calming measures like raised crosswalks, roundabouts and high visibility signage that actually slow vehicles down.”
On their use of “actually slow vehicles down,” Premier Doug Ford has erroneously claimed that automated speed-enforcement cameras don’t slow down motorists, despite the fact they have proven effective just about everywhere they’ve been deployed, including Greater Sudbury.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.