City says 12 speed cameras vandalized ‘beyond repair’ in 2024
Posted January 10, 2025 12:13 pm.
Last Updated January 10, 2025 4:53 pm.
The Parkside Drive speed camera that sits symbolically frozen in the High Park pond after an unknown suspect chopped it down wasn’t the only one targeted in the past year.
The City of Toronto says 12 Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras were vandalized “beyond repair” in 2024.
The trend has already continued in 2025.
“There was one incident on Jan. 2, 2025, where the camera on Avenue Road near Oaklands was vandalized beyond repair,” a city official told CityNews. “The camera has since been reinstalled.”
The city says it is “exploring solutions including remote monitoring that may help alleviate some of the vandalism issues” but didn’t provide further details.
On Thursday, the camera on Parkside Drive was back up and running after being cut down on three occasions over the past few months. The latest incident saw it tossed into the High Park pond, where it still lays frozen.
Advocacy group Safe Parkside noted that the latest Parkside Drive camera is “more robust” than previous incarnations.
A City spokesperson confirmed that the latest speed camera at the location will be tougher to topple.
“The vendor has installed a new type of pole that will make it more difficult to vandalize the camera and hopefully prevent further incidents from happening.”
Despite that, Safe Parkside says the camera’s sturdiness isn’t the main issue at hand — it’s calling instead for a redesign of the street.
The group says the fact that the Parkside camera quickly became the city’s “most prolific and profitable” is a testament to the street’s inherently dangerous design.
“The more than 65,000 speeding tickets issued to date and the nearly $7 million that the City of Toronto has generated from the lack of safety on Parkside Drive highlights the urgent need for a redesign of this fast and deadly street.”
The group notes that there have been nearly 1,500 collisions, three of them fatal, on the two-kilometre street in the past decade.
“A speed camera that has recently spent more time on its side or in a pond than it has upright and functioning has clearly fallen well short of addressing the dangers that persist on Parkside Drive,” it said in a release.
In a previous statement to CityNews, the City of Toronto acknowledged the need for changes on the street but said it has already taken steps to try and make things safer.
“The city has made several safety and road design improvements on Parkside Drive over the last few years, including reducing speed limits and adding signage. However, the design of Parkside Drive needs to be updated to meet today’s safety guidelines and standards.”
As for the dozen destroyed cameras, the city stresses that it does not own the cameras, which are a vendor-provided service, and their repair or replacement doesn’t ding taxpayers.
When a camera is vandalized, “it is the vendor’s responsibility to replace or fix the devices within a maximum of 30 days and report serious incidents of vandalism to Toronto Police Services,” a city spokesperson told CityNews.
“There is no cost to the city (and) no additional taxpayer dollars are spent each time an ASE device is damaged, as this is built into the contract with the vendor.”
