REGINA – Regina city council voted Monday night to fund major upgrades to the city’s red light cameras. Currently, two cameras are out of order and the others are only catching half of violators due to poor image quality of the cameras.
There was debate during the council meeting about the effectiveness of red light cameras to actually cut down on the number of accidents, with some city councilors calling the research on the subject “mixed.”
However, delegates from the Regina Police Service and SGI were strongly in favour of not only maintaining the program, but improving it.
Council approved a committee report recommendation to spend an extra $100,000 a year, which would include the cost to replace the analog cameras with new digital cameras that would provide clearer images.
The city will likely not see that upgrade though, until next year.
“The company that provides the service for us says that the analog is no longer sustainable. They’ve agreed, or they feel that they can get enough film that they can continue into 2015, so it likely won’t be until after 2015 that there will be a change,” said Superintendent Lance Dudar of the Regina Police Service.
Last year, the total revenue generated from the program was more than $530,000.
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