Traffic was moving at about the speed limit on Highway 404 on a recent afternoon as I drove north, away from Toronto. I was listening to gentle music when a white Dodge Charger blew past me in a cacophony of noise on my right, flying across my path into the left-most lane at probably double my speed. I jumped and gripped the wheel more tightly.
Then, a second white Dodge Charger did the exact same thing a couple of seconds later and I jumped again and cursed and gripped the wheel even more tightly. The two cars were racing through traffic. I lost track when one pulled into the HOV (High-Occupancy Vehicle) lane on the left and the other took the merging ramp on the right, with perhaps four lanes of busy traffic between them. I fully expected to see a sudden explosion.
Instances similar to this, while rare, are one reason the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) wants to implement “intelligent speed assistance technology” in new vehicles, and to do so as soon as possible.
In the NTSB’s own words: “Intelligent speed assistance technology, or ISA, uses a car’s GPS location compared with a database of posted speed limits and its on-board cameras to help ensure safe and legal speeds. Passive ISA systems warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit through visual, sound or haptic alerts, and the driver is responsible for slowing the car. Active systems include mechanisms that make it more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit, and those that electronically limit the speed of the vehicle to fully prevent drivers from exceeding the speed limit.”
The NTSB was reacting to a horrific crash in Las Vegas last year. The driver of a Dodge Challenger roared through a red light at 165 kilometres an hour and straight into the side of a Toyota minivan. The Challenger driver, his passenger and all seven people in the minivan were killed. According to the NTSB report, the Challenger driver was impaired by cocaine and PCP, and had a history of speeding offences that had not been properly prosecuted.
The NTSB does not make law, but it does make influential recommendations. As a result of this awful collision, and the 12,330 fatalities in the United States in 2021 that the NTSB says were caused by speeding-related crashes, it’s recommending that car manufacturers install ISA technology in all new passenger vehicles. At a minimum, this will warn drivers when a vehicle is speeding. It also wants to assist states in implementing ISA interlock programs (mandatory speed limiters) for repeat speeding offenders.
This won’t be hard to do. Most new vehicles are already connected to GPS signals that tell their drivers what the local speed limit is, and some of those will change the colour of the speed readout to warn when the limit is being exceeded. It’s a nice thing to know, but often makes little difference, especially when the vast majority of drivers are comfortable driving a little faster than the limit.
Years ago, long before GPS became easily accessible, the Japanese tried legislating something similar: All new cars sold in Japan had to be fitted with a warning light on the dash that illuminated bright red whenever the national speed limit was exceeded. Most drivers taped over the light and some even took it as a point of pride to keep it lit as much as possible. The legislation only lasted a couple of years.
Now, however, we have connected cars and easy, over-the-air updates. We have autonomous cars in some cities that already drive no faster than the posted speed limit. Some high-end vehicles can even set their active cruise controls to follow the local limits, or a fixed speed just slightly faster. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine that their computers might one day be controlled from outside the vehicle.
“Any technology or initiative that can help improve road safety is absolutely welcomed by the insurance industry,” says Rob de Pruis, the national director of consumer and industry relations for the Insurance Bureau of Canada. “We know that when you have excess speed, you have more severe damages when there are vehicle collisions, and more severe injuries.”
There’s been no push in Canada for such legislation – at least, not yet, says David Adams, president of the Global Automakers of Canada, which represents 15 automakers. “My view is we’re going down this road anyway,” he says.
In theory, the idea of forcing a vehicle to obey the posted speed limits is a good thing. However, Chris Klimek, founder of Stop100, which advocates for more realistic, usually higher, speed limits on roads (including in neighbourhoods where they have been lowered) and highways in Ontario, says many of those limits have been reduced in recent years because of political interests, not road safety.
Speed limits have also been reduced on some rural side roads and some new roads are built with lower limits than would have been previously recommended. Posted limits have increased on some sections of highways.
“Our speed limit reductions in Ontario are not based on actual fatalities – they’re based on hearsay and suspicions and feelings,” he says. Ontario is consistently the safest or second-safest jurisdiction in North America, he says, including in those years when higher speed limits were common. “Why should the majority be punished for the sin of the minority?” he asks.
More than 250,000 drivers were involved in collisions in 2020, according to the Ontario Road Safety Annual Report. For 2,109 of the 42,453 drivers (5 per cent) involved in a collision where there was an injury, ‘speed too fast’ and ‘speed too fast for conditions’ was cited as the action of the driver. Of 811 drivers involved in a fatal collision, 107 (13 per cent) were speeding. Drivers involved in a speed-related collision that resulted in a fatality or injury are less than 1 per cent of the drivers involved in a collision.
Bruce Hellinga would beg to differ with Klimek. He’s a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo, who specializes in transportation.
“In North America, we generally have the view that the open road is freedom and no one should be able to tell me what I can do in my vehicle. But in the U.S., about 40,000 people die each year from collisions” – not just from speeding – “and in Canada it’s about one-10th of that, maybe a little less. It’s not an insignificant problem, but we, as a society, seem to have just accepted this. There’s a culture here around driving that has caused reluctance to introduce more restrictions – even though we know there’s a big safety issue associated with it.”
Me? I just hope the cops catch those drivers of the two white Chargers on the 404 and throw away their keys before they kill somebody.
Mark Richardson