My little house in Lethbridge is on 13th St. South, one of the city’s oldest streets. A canopy of mature elms reaches out and joins—with interlocking branches—two of the oldest, most beautiful neighbourhoods in the city: the London Road area and Upper Victoria Park. The trunks of those stately elm trees, the foliage and flowers of Nanking and Evans cherries and honeysuckles, the teetering old white picket fences and the straight new cedar-plank ones, the toothy, plastic realtor signs, hand-drawn cardboard garage-sale posters, transit benches and long-parked vehicles make up the charms of the street.
Two houses down and kitty-corner from us are two seniors facilities. Just around that corner, where 13th St. intersects 9th Ave., is the playing field of an elementary school. According to City of Lethbridge traffic data, this intersection is the most dangerous in the city.
I have lived on this street for 19 years. Traffic here was always a bit noisy, a bit fast. But in the past few years something happened. As traffic volume increased after the pandemic, the speed, noise and aggressiveness of drivers multiplied. The street became a racetrack, not just for the occasional stunter but for a majority of drivers.
The noise is nearly unbearable most days; it often feels like a vehicle is driving through the house. And getting in and out of our truck in front of the house has become more dangerous. Drivers pass at full speed within inches of me. While we were unloading groceries one evening in 2021, a driver smashed into the back of our truck, pushing it into a tree, totalling it. Another driver hit my next truck parked in the same spot in 2023, smashing it into my partner’s car and totalling both.
One spring morning in 2022, while hurrying to make coffee, I left our nine-month-old bluetick hound pup, Jack, waiting at the back door for me. I forgot that Jack could open the door if it was unlatched. Soon he was out in front of the house. I raced to the front door just in time to see Jack sitting and waiting at the curb, as I had taught him, but fixated on a dog on the other side of the street.
Before I could get the door open and shout his name, Jack gave in to his excitement, forgot his training and began running across. A truck and trailer struck him. His body tumbled halfway down the block. The bloodstains were on the asphalt for a week.
In the chaos and horror of that Monday, when Jack seemed to wake up again and try to breathe—even before the vet told us it was agonal breathing, that he was already brain-dead—I was already making a vow. I would fight to make our street safe again.
In May 2022 I contacted our city traffic engineering manager to tell him about Jack and discuss the growing problem of speeding on our street. The man replied that his department already knew our intersection sees the most right-angle collisions—the most dangerous kind—of any residential neighbourhood in the city. He agreed to order a traffic speed study.
In November 2022 the city deployed the speed study along the same half block that Jack’s blood had stained. Over three days, during the hours that children were walking to or from the school around the corner, 74 per cent of all drivers—23,343 out of 31,764—were found to be speeding, with the top speed during school hours at 110 km/h.
The City’s response, to my surprise, was that the results of the study were normal, due to something the traffic engineering manager called the “85th percentile theory.” The theory—developed in 1961, when vehicle speeds topped out at barely 100 km/h—privileges, above all other considerations, the speed at which 85 per cent of drivers feel they can still operate safely. In traffic departments still using the theory, so long as the 85th percentile speed isn’t more than 10 km/h above the posted limit, there is no need to change the limit or take extraordinary measures to reduce traffic speeds. In effect, traffic engineers using the formula create an unofficial speed limit to reinterpret traffic study data so that it seems like only 15 per cent of drivers are speeding. And traffic engineers will even use the formula to raise speed limits.
The US National Association of City Transportation Officials says the 85th-percentile formula is “designed to fail.” When drivers see other cars going faster, they increase their speed as well, creating a ratcheting effect for speed that has no relation to actual traffic safety. The formula has a deadly blind spot for pedestrians and cyclists, because it was never developed for them or with their safety in mind. The theory was intended for setting speed limits on highways, where visibility is unobstructed and drivers are protected by the structures, materials and crash-safety systems of their vehicles.
Bad traffic theory is only part of the problem on a street like ours. So is street design. As with many communities in Alberta, city founders designed our wide old streets during the late 1800s not to be four-lane highways running through neighbourhoods but so that a full four-horse wagon team could make a U-turn. In 1906 the Alberta government legislated its first urban speed limit at 10 mph, to protect horses from the motor vehicles—or “terror wagons”—that were beginning to use the same streets.
Over the ensuing decades, drivers would begin to occupy the full width of our streets, but until the 1950s the primary users were pedestrians, cyclists, buses and streetcars. That’s when traffic engineers and governments began treating streets like ours, designed for horse and buggy traffic, as large arteries to move motor vehicle traffic quickly through our cities, with the assumption that “wider is safer.”
A 2023 Johns Hopkins study showed that, in fact, narrow streets are safer. Where speed limits are low, the width of a street doesn’t much affect traffic safety. But at 50 km/h, the wider the street, the less safe it is. That’s in part because more lanes and wider streets don’t give drivers more room for mistakes. They just make them drive faster.
And something else terrifying happens when a driver surpasses 50 km/h, on any kind of street in an urban environment.
The morning my puppy was killed, as I scooped up his body I heard behind me the driver saying over and over “I never even saw him.” The man was decent enough to drop off a few hundred dollars to pay for part of the emergency care. But for a long time I wondered how in the hell the driver hadn’t seen Jack. Of course it was my fault our puppy got out of the house. But Jack had been sitting, waiting, four lanes away from the approaching driver, with no obstacles between them. And how was the driver still going full speed when he hit Jack?
According to studies used by state and provincial governments across North America, the limit of brain processing speed causes a shortening of pupil distance in humans with any increase in rate of movement. As a result, even when we’re just walking, the faster we move, the narrower our field of vision. At speeds up to 40 km/h, a driver in a city has good enough peripheral vision to be aware of what’s happening on sidewalks and approaching streets. At 50 km/h, a driver’s field of vision narrows so that it becomes difficult to see a person or puppy emerging from a curb. At roughly 55 km/h—the average speed of drivers on our street—real tunnel vision begins to set in. By about 60 km/h and above—the speed of at least 15 per cent of drivers in the 85th-percentile regime on our streets—the vision cone has narrowed so much that drivers can see only the backs of the vehicles in front of them.
In other words, the man who hit Jack really hadn’t seen him. Nor was he a “bad driver.” Or at least no worse than the other 74 per cent of drivers on our street going above the 50 km/h limit every day, who because of the effect of speed on field of vision might as well be driving impaired.
But why did it take that driver so long to stop even after he hit Jack? Why did his truck and trailer drag and roll my puppy’s body so far down the block, making death certain?
According to studies used by transportation engineering and safety associations around the world, reaction time for the average driver is 1.5–2.5 seconds. In the time it takes for anyone’s brain to process that they need to begin stopping, a driver going 60 km/h will travel at least 25 metres. Visual obstacles—our elm trees, bushes, fences, parked cars etc.—limit visibility to 19–30 metres in many places. Most drivers’ brains won’t begin to tell them to stop until after they have hit someone.
Once a driver does begin to brake, in ideal conditions the vehicle will travel at least another 30 metres, with a final total stopping distance of between 60 and 80 metres, more than half a block. When a vehicle is going 40 km/h, a pedestrian’s chance of surviving an impact is nearly 100 per cent. At 50 km/h, the chance of survival falls to 10–20 per cent. At 60 km/h, survivability flatlines to nearly zero.
According to data from the Canadian Traffic Injury Research Foundation and the US Department of Transportation, while pedestrians are involved in only 2 per cent of serious traffic collisions, they represent nearly 20 per cent of fatalities from these incidents (cyclist numbers are similar). A cyclist or pedestrian struck in a collision is nearly 300 times more likely to be killed than anyone inside the motor vehicle. Senior citizens are the most likely to be hit by speeders; aging impairs perception and judgment of the distance of an approaching vehicle, and it makes getting out of the way more difficult. Children as cyclists and pedestrians are most likely to be killed in a collision.
Drivers speed on streets like ours for one simple reason: no one is looking.
In a February 2023 meeting with the chief of Lethbridge Police Service (LPS), I learned that the city’s automated traffic enforcement system didn’t deploy a single photo radar vehicle on our street during the two years before the November 2022 study (due in part to the pandemic). In that meeting the chief promised a six-month “blitz” of our street with enhanced traffic enforcement. But with reportedly only seven staffed patrol cars available to LPS at any given time—for all offences, not just traffic—the blitz amounted to just 93 hours of patrol car enforcement over 180 days, or an average of just over 30 minutes per day for the entire length of a street that sees nearly eight million vehicle trips per year, or about 20,000 per day (with nearly 15,000 of these vehicles speeding, and 3,000 of them at extreme speeds). During that time, officers issued only 176 tickets, an average of one per day of the blitz.
Why so few tickets, with a speeder passing traffic patrollers every four to five seconds, and roughly two extreme speeders passing every minute? Presumably a significant part of the 30 minutes “patrol” time per day of the “blitz” would have involved the act of issuing the lone daily ticket. But patrollers must also be selective, only going after the most egregious speeding. This is in part because, according to traffic officers interviewed, no judge will prosecute any driver going less than 10 km/h over the limit, due to speedometer calibration issues. But if the only reason for not ticketing all drivers going above 50 km/h is speedometer calibration legalities, why not just lower all city speed limits to 40 km/h? Or, heck, why not lower them even just to 45 km/h and save at least a few more lives by being able to begin ticketing at 55 km/h? The answer: Catch-22.
Since 2019, successive UCP governments have imposed a freeze on all new photo-radar installations in Alberta communities unless the locations are school, playground or construction zones. As part of its moratorium, the government also made it illegal for cities to use photo radar on any streets where speed limits are below 50 km/h (excluding school and playground zones). So, a city can keep the higher, proven-unsafe speed limit of 50 km/h, use scarce police resources to ticket only drivers going above 60 km/h, and still use photo radar on the most dangerous streets. Or it can lower speed limits but lose the right to use photo radar to enforce the new limits.
The blame for the province’s ongoing war on traffic radar might not just be the post-pandemic wave of anti-government libertarianism that Danielle Smith’s UCP rode to power in 2023. An apparent analytical failure in an automated traffic enforcement review report done by MNP for Alberta Transportation in 2018 could also have contributed to the governing UCP’s hostility—and the opposition NDP’s ambivalence—towards traffic radar. The first pages of the report repeatedly emphasize that traffic radar installations had only made “small” or “modest” impacts on overall traffic safety in the province—only 1.4 per cent fewer collisions and 5.2 per cent fewer severe collisions overall. But MNP based this conclusion on the impact of a relatively tiny number of installations instead of on total collision rates across cities and the whole province.
On the other hand, virtually every other jurisdictional report referred to deep in the body and appendices of the MNP report reached very different conclusions by using a far more meaningful metric: the impact of traffic radar at the street and neighbourhood level, within 500 metres of installations. These studies, from Arizona to Australia, show that traffic radar reduced the rates of speeding by up to 70 per cent, brought the extreme-speeder category from 15 per cent down to 1 per cent, reduced the number of dangerous angle collisions by up to 85 per cent and, most importantly, reduced the number of severe injuries and deaths by up to 68 per cent. (Closer to home, a 2023 review for the City of St. Albert found that traffic radar reduced “unacceptable speeding” by 92 per cent.)
The results of the UCP’s years-long war on traffic safety have recently begun emerging in bloody detail. The province’s collision data from 2020 to 2021—the most recent years available—show a 20 per cent uptick in pedestrian injuries and deaths, after a steady decline in the years before the moratorium on traffic radar. After one motorist killed a man in his 60s and another killed a 17-year-old girl at a crosswalk in early 2025, the City of Calgary reported that collisions in that city causing serious injuries rose by 20 per cent between 2023 and 2024 (from 2,424 to 2,908), and pedestrian fatalities jumped from four to 13.
In November 2024 the UCP government doubled down on its moratorium by cutting the number of existing photo radar installations from 2,200 to around 650 and prohibiting any photo radar anywhere but in playground or school and construction zones. The province said it might begin allowing individual applications for traffic camera installations on a case-by-case basis. But as one Lethbridge officer told me, local police and communities have no idea about the process or requirements for restoring photo radar to the streets that need it.
Decisions about where radar is needed will now be political and made by people who don’t live—or die—here.
Minister of Transportation Devin Dreeshen says gutting automated traffic enforcement will stop communities from using photo radar as a “cash cow.” But according to Alberta Municipalities, most of the province’s cities and towns don’t actually get any money from traffic fines for general revenues. In 2020 the province upped its take of fines from 26.7 per cent to 40 per cent. Except for those few municipalities without police and who need to hire peace officers, the rest must commit the remaining 60 per cent of fine revenues to community traffic safety programmes and victims funds.
UCP government restrictions on municipal funding have forced cities to stretch police budgets to deal with an exploding addictions and homelessness crisis, which limits police resources for human-operated traffic law enforcement. In another Catch-22, the province is making automated traffic enforcement more necessary at the same time it is taking it away.
If the move to cut photo radar was done to save Albertans money, the decision has been penny-wise and pound-tragic. When Dreeshen made his late 2024 announcement, he said fines from traffic radar amounted to $145-million annually across the province. Besides the incalculable cost of collisions to victims, their families and the community, the City of Calgary pegs the cost of medical response to collisions, lost wages, property damage etc. at about $1.2-billion annually. In Calgary alone.
No elected official in Lethbridge has publicly called for an end to the moratorium on photo radar. Even progressive politicians in this city publicly refer to traffic radar as “speed traps.” Neither has any called out the city’s culture of speed. No one seems to want to get between the addict and their drug—be it the minutes-behind soccer family in their minivan or the bird-flipping driver of the sport-lifted truck.
The majority drives, the majority speeds, the majority elects.
Some local communities, however, have recognized that traffic safety is a civil rights issue, and are beginning to make the safety of vulnerable non-vehicular users central to traffic policy. The City of Edmonton, and later Calgary, recently took the lead in adopting more 40 km/h and 30 km/h speed limits. Municipalities as diverse as Spruce Grove, St. Albert and Banff have been lowering their speed limits by adopting and implementing the principles of Vision Zero, a national and global traffic safety alliance that aims to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero.
Vision Zero rejects the use of the 85th percentile theory for setting traffic policy because it puts only the driver’s feeling of safety—not science or even common sense—above the safety and well-being of pedestrians and cyclists, the young and old, and all vulnerable users. Vision Zero challenges the notion of laying blame for a death on the vulnerable user, saying that cities and drivers must take full responsibility for the safety of all users of our roads. Traffic engineers must not sacrifice the quality of life of people in homes near roads by enabling speeding. And traffic departments should never wait for someone to be killed before taking action to make every street safe.
For help in my fight to make my street safe, I joined my neighbourhood association in summer 2022. In February 2023 I approached councillor John Middleton-Hope—a former officer and city police chief—and asked for his help. Middleton-Hope—who would campaign unsuccessfully as the UCP candidate for MLA in the December 2024 Lethbridge-West by-election—received from me a motion drafted and passed by the neighbourhood association requesting that the city reduce the speed limit on 13th St. to 40 km/h, install a permanent photo radar camera and take other measures to improve traffic safety here. (We were unaware of the province-wide moratorium on new photo radar at the time.)
In April 2023 councillor Middleton-Hope and the rest of Lethbridge city council also received a letter from a group of surgeons at Chinook Regional Hospital pleading for the city to reduce speed limits to 40 km/h city-wide, due to the high rate of injuries and deaths in collisions. That same month the Lethbridge Public School Board—alarmed by the data from the November 2022 speed study on 13th St., especially given the street passes an elementary school—also wrote to city council urging serious action on the speeding problem.
The City’s infrastructure services manager responded with an email to me and city council saying that although our intersection has a high number of collisions, it’s nevertheless “typical” of others like it. One graph in the manager’s letter compared our street to a commercial intersection that had exactly one more collision in a five-year period, most of less severity. Another graph compared the top speed on our street to a fence-divided block that is the transition zone for acceleration onto Whoop-Up Drive, where the posted speed limit is 90 km/h. Both of these other “typical” locations have had recent pedestrian fatalities.
Councillor Middleton-Hope—whose door-to-door campaign for MLA used “Safe Streets” as a slogan (referring to a drugs and homelessness crisis, not actual streets and traffic)—followed up with an email to me saying he felt the City had “done its due diligence on the matter.” In September 2023 Lethbridge city council approved a 40-km/h pilot project in Middleton-Hope’s own remote Paradise Canyon suburb in the far south of the city.
In November 2023 a hit-and-run driver struck a senior citizen on a crosswalk on 13th St., breaking his hips and legs and putting him in intensive care for a week. When I asked an LPS officer whether another senior in the city had survived after being hit by a motorist on the same day a friend’s son had been hit a block from our house in December 2024, he said he didn’t know, because “pedestrians are being hit all the time.” Too many to keep track of.
In 2024 LPS took several months to consider and then deny a freedom-of-information request I made asking for data on the number of pedestrian-involved collisions in the entire city over the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then, at 7:30 a.m. on January 21, 2025, at a marked crosswalk on a street just like ours in North Lethbridge, a motorist struck three children. It happened at another “accidental highway,” where thousands of cars speed through residential neighbourhoods every day. Fourteen-year-old Marcus, seven-year-old Juliana and five-year-old Joey Bucud—children of Filipino-Canadian immigrants—were holding hands as they crossed to go to school. Witnesses say the driver stopped but was in shock and unable to help. The children were airlifted to Calgary for emergency treatment and surgery, and at the time of writing are slowly recovering.
Lethbridge police have confirmed that our provincial government now bans the use of photo radar at the intersection where a driver ran over the three Bucud children. The intersection is near a school but not in a school zone, very much like our intersection.
The local community responded with love for the family and anger for the driver. Social media quickly blew up with calls for prison time for the driver. For not watching where she was going. For being a bad driver. For being a bad person.
I’d like to tell that driver something different.
I’d tell her how angry I was at the man who hit Jack. And then I’d tell her what I’ve learned since. That the man who killed Jack was no different than 74 per cent of drivers on our street or in our city. That the speed limit the City refuses to lower, or even enforce, creates a situation where drivers can’t see anything or anyone until it’s too late. That she’s probably not such a bad driver or a bad person and that she most certainly doesn’t belong in jail. That our government and local politicians and police failed her as much as they failed the Bucud family and mine.
Virgil Grandfield is an investigative journalist and National Magazine Award-winning writer who lives in Lethbridge.
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