REGINA – It has been seven months since the province began ticketing drivers through its photo radar program and so far, the cameras have brought in $5.4 million.
Around 19,000 tickets were issued in Regina and roughly 10,000 in Saskatoon between March and September.
Kelley Brinkworth, SGI’s media relations manager, said it hasn’t been enough time to determine any trends or if the project is actually resulting in fewer people speeding.
But she stressed that there has been progress in achieving the project’s short term goal of less than one per cent of people in violation.
“Overall for all of the locations across the province, when we get the average were looking at about 1.1 percent. So were actually getting close ,” she said.
However, a troubling amount of the violations are in school zones.
In Regina those zones are in effect year round, but even in September when kids came back to school more than 2,200 speeders were ticketed.
Saskatoon meanwhile, only handed out 300 tickets in school zones in the same month.
The cameras have been criticized for being a money grab, but Brinkworth said of the revenue collected, around $2 million covers the program’s expenses, another million contributes to the Victims of Crime Fund, and the remainder goes back into traffic safety.
SGI’s photo radar pilot program is set up in eight locations in the province.
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