Toronto councillors vote to examine garbage truck speeding after CTV News investigation

A Toronto city committee has voted to demand more information about how fast city vehicles are going and whether they’re paying their traffic fines after a CTV News Toronto investigation showed pictures of hundreds of city vehicles speeding, including garage trucks and heavy equipment.

The pictures, which were obtained through a freedom of information request, showed dozens of large vehicles caught speeding by the city’s automated speed enforcement cameras, including one garbage truck speeding by a North York school as it left for the day.

That school, Milne Valley Middle School, is in the ward of Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who presented a motion to the city’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee.

“One of the pictures I saw was in front of a local school in my ward. I was troubled,” said Minnan-Wong.

“I do believe that we do need to take action on this. We’re in a leadership position at Vision Zero. We’re asking people to reduce their speeds, and we are to lead by example. There’s a higher duty for our employees,” he said.

The committee passed his motion to get city staff to provide the number of automated speed enforcement speeding tickets issued to Toronto Solid Waste Services, broken down by vehicle type, velocity, and infraction location, summarize ticket payments by staff and the city, and provide consequences of traffic violations beyond fines for members of the public service.

The fine payments were at issue as the tickets provided by the city do not include how fast they are going, nor the fine that was incurred. The city withheld that on security grounds, arguing that if it disclosed the amount people would be able to know what the threshold that triggered a ticket would be, and increase their speed accordingly which would be a public safety risk.

Meanwhile, the TTC and the provincial government disclosed the speeds of their vehicles in requests to CTV News Toronto.

“I’m troubled by the fact that a lot of other organizations, even our agencies, disclosed the speed they’re travelling at,” said Minnan-Wong. “The public needs to know if they’re speeding, and what their rate of speed is.”

Crashes involving Toronto city vehicles have turned deadly. In 2019, a garbage truck killed a pedestrian and in 2013, one turning left killed a five-year-old girl.

The city was not tracking its employee's tickets and, as the owner of the vehicles, was paying the speeding tickets by default, when CTV News Toronto first explored the issue last year.

The city started to track its tickets, and is poised now to move beyond a manual system. But city data shows that some departments are projected to not pay all of the ticket money back.

Water, Fleet Services, MLS, and Corporate Real Estate were projected to recover all of their employee’s fines from the year after the automated cameras were deployed.

But Transportation Services and Parks, Forestry and Recreation were only projected to get 80 per cent of their fines, and Solid Waste Management was projected to only recover 70 per cent of the fines incurred in that year.

That so many professional drivers would be caught speeding is a sign of a design problem on Toronto’s roads, said Albert Koehl of the Avenue Road Safety Coalition.

“If I’m hit by a car, my body doesn’t care if it’s being driven by a city official or a neighbour or someone visiting the city. What people care about is the speed of the vehicle,” he said.

The committee also approved a motion to bring the number of cameras to 75, and expanding the community safety zones where the cameras are allowed to be placed.

CTV News also made a similar request to the Toronto Police, who have not responded with any tickets after about six months.

"Some requests are more complex than others and we need to take into account any sensitive information that could compromise our operational integrity or officer safety. This includes identification of covert vehicles," said spokesperson Connie Osborne.