Last night while driving home from work, the main drag was congested so I took a residential route. Naturally, I slowed down to 30km per hour while driving through a playground zone. As is often the case, there was a pick-up truck right on my back bumper. I pulled over and let him pass. Tailgating is an epidemic and law enforcement isn’t interested in pursuing this infraction with tickets. Drivers will have a propensity for checking their rear view mirror to see how much closer the ahole is going to get when they should be keeping an eye out for for children.
Now, imagine driving through this zone at a crawl and then confronted with a new reduced 40km per hour limit after the playground zone instead of 50. People will be perturbed while now thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner or thoughts of being late to pick up the kids. Their focus will not be on driving as it would be at a reasonable speed of 50km per hour for the conditions.
One thing is for sure – if the residential speed limit is reduced to 40km / hr then a municipality will have more revenues from speeding tickets generated through camera catches that it would at a speed of 50 km /hr.
We would hope that child safety is the motivator for considering such a change but I’m suspect. The current residential speed limit has served Canadians well for decades. Current infractions on the books such as “failure to stop”, “crosswalk incursions”, “failure to stop in advance of a stop line”, “failure to signal” do not get enforced. , “Failure to turn into nearest lane”, “unsafe lane changes”, and “failure to give distance” don’t apparently get taught in driver’s school or are simply disregarded due to drivers understanding that sanctions against such poor driving habits will not be applied.
You have bloated bureaucracies in Canada looking for places to turn their attention when what they need to do is execute their current agenda with precision.
Lastly, you will have mothers who believe this is a good proposal. I suggest that strong parenting along with common sense supervision has worked for decades when it comes to children and traffic law.