These are the top spots in Edmonton where people received speeding tickets

If you drive in Edmonton, you've undoubtedly come upon or driven past bright yellow speed enforcement trucks parked around the city.

And if you've been caught speeding, you probably remember exactly where you were. 

But we wanted to know where the city plants its speed trucks and how many tickets are issued at each site. 

Thankfully, the the City of Edmonton posts that data to its open data portal. 

The data goes back to January 2019 for mobile enforcement so we took a look at three years worth of data up until the end of March 2022. 

Here's what we found.

According to the data, about 575,000 speeding tickets were issued to drivers in Edmonton between January 2019 and March 2022.

The map above shows the total amount of time, or enforcement hours, at a particular location in the city. 

Below are the top three spots where the most tickets have been given out.

• Stony Plain Road westbound, between 178th and 182nd Street. This location has seen 29,867 tickets. 
• Anthony Henday Drive eastbound at Ray Gibbon Drive. This spot has seen 24,887 tickets.
• Yellowhead Trail eastbound at Anthony Henday Drive. This spot has seen 22,788 tickets.

The table below looks at how many tickets have been issued, what the speed limit is and how far over the speed limit they were travelling when they were ticketed. 

Speed camera controversy 

Speeding and how municipalities radar deploy has long been a hot button topic across the province. Some people see the use of speed cameras as nothing more than a cash grab. Advocates for their use see them as one tool in the arsenal to stop speeding drivers.

But public pushback forced the hand of the provincial government when it put a moratorium on installing photo radar equipment, upgrading existing equipment and adding new photo radar locations back in 2019.

"Albertans can be confident these new rules will put a stop to photo radar fishing holes or speed traps," said then-transportation minister Rajan Sawhney at the time of the government announcement.

Photo radar generated $203 million in Alberta in 2019/20, which was shared by the province and 26 participating municipalities.

The freeze has been extended to December 2022. 

City enforcement highly regulated

Edmonton is one of 26 municipalities in the province that uses photo radar. It is required that those cities and communities post information about how they enforce their programs. 

Jessica Lamarre, director of safe mobility and traffic operations with the City of Edmonton, said where the city can place mobile enforcement is legislated, and if they want to enforce in a new area, an application package has to be put together. 

"Just the fact that we enforce there means that there's been an established safety problem at that location that needs the support of automated enforcement," she said. 

"For example, for the last two years, we haven't been able to establish any sites in construction zones, because those are technically new automated enforcement locations," she said.

The money from automated enforcement fines goes into a reserve fund which is dedicated to being reinvested into traffic safety initiatives.

"[The fund] has been the sole source of funding for all of Safe Mobility's programs and projects," Rajna Tufegdzic, manager of Automated Enforcement with the city said in a statement.

"Costs do include staff to coordinate the work, funding positions to manage and implement the programs, including safe mobility engineers, data analysts, automated enforcement staff, communications, and engagement professionals." 

It also funds $22.3 million annually to the Edmonton Police Service. 

Police speed enforcement mostly complaint-driven 

One important thing to note is that the city runs operations of the mobile enforcement program. The police do not do that in Edmonton, which is an anomaly among Albertan cities. The people in the vehicles are third-party contractors.

Placement of the vehicles is fairly evenly distributed throughout the city, with a few hotspots. 

Sgt. Kerry Bates with the Edmonton Police Service's traffic safety unit said higher-speed roadways often lead to danger spots in the city. During the pandemic, traffic decreased but speed increased, he said. 

He said there are places where there is less traffic where speeds pick up in the city, like Yellowhead Trail and 97th Street north of 137 Avenue.

Police are not bound by the same mobile enforcement guidelines that the city is, meaning they can set up speed cameras and radar without an application process.

Bates said their enforcement is driven mostly by complaints and problem areas that members become familiar with.

For their part, police speeding enforcement came out with mid-year numbers of in July of high-speed incidents so far in 2022. This year has already surpassed the last year, with 350 people caught going more than 40 km/h over the speed limit.

Last year's total was 252.