Traffic Tickets: The Blindspot that Threatens Our Rights and Safety
How one of Manitoba’s biggest cash cows is endangering lives and stripping us of our legal rights.
Photos by Christian Sweryda
Traffic tickets. We’ve all gotten one, or know someone who has. If the charges seemed unfair, there’s a very good chance they were, and that’s entirely by design.
This may sound like a relatively trivial issue, but it isn’t. Even if you don’t drive, this affects you. Our rights are being eliminated on a routine basis and hardly anyone knows about it. On January 24th, 2019, University of Winnipeg Sociology professor Curtis Pankratz invited University of Manitoba law student Christian Sweryda to give to talk to his students about our city’s manipulative traffic enforcement mechanisms and the inherent bias within our judicial system. Christian has been fighting the city and the province for roughly a decade over unfair and downright dangerous practices that violate established engineering standards, largely in order to maximize revenue from tickets, all under the false pretense of safety.
One of the most egregious examples is our school zones. Drive slow around kids, sounds like a no-brainer right? Except reduced speed school zones were removed in 1966 when it was determined they actually make kids less safe. It stands to reason that the strict limits and high penalties involved might cause drivers to unintentionally focus more on their speedometers instead of the road, but beyond that, it has actually been shown that school zones encourage a false sense of security for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike, paradoxically creating a more dangerous environment. Reduced speed school zones were brought back in 2014 without a single shred of engineering justification or having completed any crash assessments. Instead, the earlier reports explaining why they were originally removed have been destroyed.
Fortunately, the city of Edmonton has some more recent data. It removed 30 km/h school zones in 1973 for similar reasons, relying instead on other pedestrian protections like warning signs upstream of schools, flashing ambers, and designated crosswalks. Since these were not limited to a particular zone, they offered safe pedestrian access for children travelling to and from school. In 2005, Edmonton considered reimplementing school zones and had the Transportation and Streets Department produce a report regarding their effectiveness. They studied collision rates involving children and found that very few incidents occurred in potential school zones compared to elsewhere, and even fewer during the hours that the zones would be active. They then compared their own collision rates with Calgary’s, which already had reduced speed limits in both playground and school zones. It was revealed that Calgary actually had a higher number of collisions per capita involving elementary school aged children.
The report also mentioned a before-and-after study of Saskatoon’s reduced speed school zones that found only 23% of drivers adhered to the 30 km/h limit, provoking yet more worries about a false sense of security, as well as concerns about increased speed variation (more on that later).
Furthermore, the Edmonton Police Service recommended against reintroducing school zones citing the fact that most traffic issues around schools were related to congestion, improper turns, and failure to yield to pedestrians during pick-up and drop-off times — not speeding. In addition, should reduced speed zones be implemented, enforcing them would divert police resources away from higher priority locations associated with high collision and fatality rates.
Based on the findings of their report, Edmonton decided not to reinstate its school zones in 2005, but eventually did bring them back in 2014, much like Winnipeg, without any new evidence to support the change. Interestingly, this happened to coincide with a pronounced photo enforcement revenue shortfall.
Not angry yet? Don’t worry, I’m just getting started.
Penalizing red light runners — that’s got to be a good thing. Sure red light cameras are annoying and we all hate them, but we have them for a good reason, right? Well, that depends on whether you stand to profit from them or not. In most cities, the duration of an amber light is directly correlated to the speed of traffic on any given road. Sounds pretty intuitive — the faster you’re going, the more time you need to stop — you don’t need to be a physics major to understand this. Width and grade of the intersection should also factor into the calculation, but Winnipeg uses a blanket 4 second amber light for every signal, regardless of speed limit or other variables.
According to engineering standards, the absolute minimum amber light duration for an 80 km/h speed zone is 4.7 seconds. Other cities not only comply with, but will typically exceed this value (Ontario’s standard is 5.4 seconds). Furthermore, everywhere else in Canada, if you enter the intersection before the red you’re fine, but in Manitoba you must exit before the red. Although the cameras will not be triggered if you don’t manage to do this, you are eligible for a ticket if an officer sees you. As explained in this 2017 engineering report, when the amber light is too short, the result is a stretch of road leading up to the intersection from which it’s literally impossible to stop in time or get across before the red, even if you have amazing reaction speed. This is aptly known as the ‘dilemma zone’, and it forces drivers to make a split second judgment call and either panic and slam on the brakes, or step on the gas and race through the intersection.
The kicker? Slamming on the brakes actually causes more accidents than entering the intersection only a split second into the red. This is thanks to the buffer provided by the all-red interval, plus the start-up delay before cars on the cross street enter the intersection. But in Winnipeg, opting for the safer alternative means risking getting a ticket — which is great for city coffers because we have by far the highest fines in the country, (on average roughly twice that of other provinces), and coincidentally, they were more than doubled after implementing photo enforcement cameras. Even more damning, immediately prior to photo enforcement, Winnipeg had amber lights up to 6 seconds in duration, and a greater number of warning flashers ahead of high-speed intersections.
Nowadays, police will actually sit at an intersection where they know the amber is too short and pick off the last two or three cars at the tail end of each light cycle. And guess what happens if a red light camera isn’t making enough money? Yep, it gets taken down and moved somewhere more profitable. The small percentage of drivers who actually run a red light dangerously rarely get caught, as ticketing has become a game of numbers where volume is targeted rather than the minority of truly negligent drivers. In fact, a 2001 Free Press article revealed the following:
“Winnipeg Police Service Traffic Patrol Sgt. Jon Butcher, who's leading the WPS's efforts to install red-light and photo-radar cameras, said adjusting amber lights would ruin the photo enforcement program.”
Wow.
Despite this slip up, police still maintain that photo enforcement increases safety, but Winnipeg’s own data shows red-light cameras don’t make intersections safer: there are actually more collisions at intersections with cameras. One could easily argue that knowledge of a camera trap might cause drivers to panic even more in the dilemma zone, making them more likely to slam on the brakes.
The issue of short ambers has repeatedly been brought to the city’s attention, increasingly so in recent years, to no avail. No less than three of Winnipeg’s engineers resigned in 2017. In 2018 a retired engineer was accused of professional misconduct for speaking out about the dangers of short amber lights, despite the National Cooperative Highway Research Program having previously reported that properly timed amber lights are associated with a reduced risk of collisions.
Not convinced? No problem, let’s keep going.
Stop signs are good, right? Welllll… yes and no. The overuse of stop signs is actually a major safety issue. Sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. Stop signs should only be used when warranted because of high traffic volumes, sight line obstructions, or high collision rates. Placing stop signs on every single low-traffic residential intersection — instead of a yield sign which is the national standard and what most other cities do — fosters disrespect of signage (when you see a stop sign on every street corner, you’re much less likely to pay attention to it than if you only see one or two during your entire commute). This is dangerous for obvious reasons, but overuse of stop signs has also been found to increase speeds mid-block as drivers subconsciously try to make up for lost time due to an unnecessary stop. Catching people rolling through stop signs is profitable though, so clearly we have them everywhere for a ‘good’ reason too.
Here’s another fun one: speed limits are purposefully set below the proper specifications based on both international studies and the city’s own engineering assessments, promoting an overall disrespect for speed limits, and disrupting the flow of traffic, which makes roads less safe. The operating speed, as it’s known, is the speed at which 85% of drivers would feel safe driving at or below, and according to engineering standards, this is where the speed limit should be set. Does Winnipeg do this? Of course not! But surely slowing down traffic by an extra margin just to be cautious can’t hurt… after all, speed kills!
I mean… yeah, sure — of course a faster moving vehicle is going to cause more damage in a collision — but excessively low speed limits aren’t the solution. Despite the posted limit, most people just drive however fast they feel safe (i.e. going with the flow of traffic). Engineering tells us that this is actually the better option, but a few drivers are ‘limit watchers’ and stick to the number on the sign no matter how ridiculously low it is. This causes accidents due to a false sense of security (again), and the conflict between faster and slower moving vehicles. Why does the city do this? You guessed it, just so they can issue more speeding tickets.
But wait, there’s more!
Winnipeg leverages road signage as a form of entrapment. It is the only city in Western Canada to not place speed limit signs on both sides of a divided road, (right side and centre boulevard/median), despite it being the engineering standard and the city’s own practice for virtually every other type of sign. Why is this a problem? Well, ever had a semi in the lane to your right obstruct your view of the curb where the speed sign is? That’s what I thought. In engineering this is called ‘sign shadowing’, and it’s a big no-no.
On top of that, deliberately misplaced, obstructed, fully hidden, broken, non-reflective, or straight up nonexistent speed limit and school zone signs are common occurrences. The city has actually taken down numerous speed limit signs, and frequently refuses to properly maintain or repair damaged ones. One well documented example is that of Brookside Blvd. When entering the city from the North perimeter, with a long stretch of open road ahead, the limit arbitrarily drops from 100 km/h to 90 km/h, seemingly out of nowhere. In March 2011, the (only) speed reduction ahead sign fell over. In May 2011, the first complaints were made to the city about it. In his talk, Christian recounted that it remained down for five months while he fought to get it fixed. Already a favourite speed trap location for the police (they call it a “fishing hole”), Brookside Blvd. became even more aggressively enforced during that time. Finally, it was the province that in October 2011, had to step in and put up their own signs just outside city limits — much larger and on both sides of the road — warning drivers of the speed drop ahead.
To rationalize its improper signage, Winnipeg has gone so far as to argue that:
“…speeding is not considered a major safety concern as it relates to a maximum speed, not necessarily established based exclusively on engineering principles.”
Yes, you read that right, they actually justified the inadequate signage by arguing that it’s not a safety concern because the speed limits are not properly set. Jumping to the other extreme, we have school zone signs where there is no actual school, and active construction zone signs when there is no construction.
To be fair, in the example above, the 80 sign isn’t actually hiding behind the lamp post, but the whole story isn’t really any better: it was flipped around when the area temporarily became a reduced speed construction zone, which is common, but it was never flipped back once the construction was finished. Despite numerous complaints, the city refused to fix it for years. The current status of the sign is unknown, but it is presumed to be resting in the ditch.
STILL not incensed? Ok, ok, you’re a tough nut to crack. That’s fine.
Tickets are routinely given out over technicalities like not having your windshield wiper fluid topped up, having your old driver’s license in your wallet on your way back from having it renewed, having an obstructed license plate during a blizzard, or for missing a front plate only because you were just side-swiped by an another vehicle. Seriously.
At this point, it should be obvious why police do this, but just in case… A 2018 study of American cities by Goldstein et al. found that in places where a large portion of municipal revenue comes from things like traffic ticket fines, police are subject to strong incentives and pressures to allocate resources to revenue-generating activities, and are “essentially commandeered” for this purpose, taking them away from other responsibilities like the investigation of violent crimes. The study also revealed that the harvesting of fines is “often implemented in a dramatically racially discriminatory fashion”, and that aggressive enforcement of these types of offences breeds distrust of police, which may impact the likelihood of citizens cooperating in investigations.
The list of shady practices I’ve tackled here is far from exhaustive, but I think you get the point, so I’ll digress.
By now I hope you’re furious, because you should be.
This is about more than unfair traffic tickets. The Crown consistently uses thoroughly unscrupulous tactics in the courts to keep this racket going. These include grossly misrepresenting facts, outright lying to judges, engaging in ambush attacks after having previously conceded an issue, usurping judicial powers, and driving wedges between clients and their representatives — just to name a few. They also have a really annoying habit of constantly contradicting their own arguments, which never seems to get them into trouble. To make matters worse, judges, who are supposed to be impartial, routinely grant wins to the Crown in contradiction of established law. Manitoba Public Insurance is 100% complicit in this charade as well, but that’s a whole other article.
This is about a system that has turned against the citizens it claims to protect. In traffic court you are presumed guilty until proven innocent — something any high school student will tell you flies directly in the face of one of the most basic and universal tenets of law. Simply paying a ticket is an admission of guilt. Whatever you are accused of doing by the police is assumed true unless you can prove otherwise, which is extremely difficult to do, even without the roadblocks strategically set up at every turn. The Crown will do everything in its power (and even go beyond it), to discourage you from setting foot in the courts. And if you have the nerve to challenge them anyway, and you can make it past the enticing offers to have your fine reduced by pleading guilty, they will fight dirty. Really dirty. Like, I-can’t-even-believe-I’m-hearing-this-right-now schoolyard level dirty. Especially if you have the gall to appoint a representative who actually knows what they’re talking about, even though the law says you can authorize whoever you want to speak on your behalf, (it’s even printed on the back of every ticket). If the person you appoint happens to be a law student who specializes in this area, they’ll simply twist said law into whatever shape necessary to make the problem go away.
Christian Sweryda has been representing people in traffic court for years, fighting against unfair tickets. The Crown obviously doesn’t like this because holding the perpetrators accountable risks breaking down the entire system. They have been systematically targeting Christian all along, attempting to bully him into relinquishing, but tellingly, it’s not until Christian started actually winning cases that they really put up a fuss. On June 6, 2018, Judicial Justice of the Peace Nettie Cuthbert-Buchanan, kicked Christian out of provincial court on completely illegitimate grounds, in direct violation of our legal right to appoint whoever we wish as representative. (JJP’s, by the way, aren’t required to have any legal training whatsoever, and this one previously worked for 20 years as a clerk in the Crown prosecution office… but somehow that isn’t considered a conflict of interest). They are trying to get rid of Christian because he is a serious (and damn persistent) thorn in their side who has more than enough evidence to bring them down. The right to defend ourselves against a system that revolves around improper incentives and therefore does not have our interests at heart, is quietly being taken away.
The fight has been taken to the Court of Queen’s Bench. The Crown’s latest complaint against Christian is that his interpretation of the legislation takes it further than what it is intended for, and it hinges on the argument that he has represented so many people (allegedly seventeen), that they cannot possibly all be his friends. The fact that the Crown would even use this as an argument is dumbfounding since your representative does not have to be a friend, it can be anyone, and there are no limits imposed on how many times a representative can appear in the court. It’s right there in plain legalese in the Provincial Offences Act, and repeated on the back of every ticket. Despite this, in an attempt to give their claim some teeth, they’ve actually completely fabricated court appearances. Manitoba Prosecution Services has compiled a list of “Confirmed Christian Sweryda Court Appearances”, and the Crown has taken various liberties in order to inflate this list, including implying Christian represented someone when he wasn’t even in the building. Conveniently and rather comically, the client in this instance happens to be my sociology professor’s wife, so we know this is an outright lie because Curtis Pankratz himself is the one who represented his wife in that case, not Christian.
What’s more, according to the Crown’s own objections to Christian’s presence in the courts, Curtis should not have been allowed to act as representative, but they made no attempt to bar him from the proceedings because lacking Christian’s particular expertise at the time, he did not pose a significant enough threat (no offence). In fact, the Crown has a very clear history of specifically barring representatives only after they’ve started having some success. As ludicrous as this sounds, it isn’t the exception but the rule.
And yes, as some of you are no doubt screaming into your devices by now, the POA does state that “a justice may bar a person from appearing as a representative if the justice finds that the person is not able to properly represent or advise the person for whom they appear.” Seems reasonable enough, but ask yourselves this: if Christian or any of the other representatives that have been barred really are unfit, why would the Crown have to go to such crazy lengths trying to discredit them?
Removing representatives who actually stand a chance of winning cases is definitely not in the public interest, but the Crown and city officials have been getting away with defending Manitoba’s fraudulent traffic enforcement system using absurd antics like these for years. As mentioned above, they’ve even gone so far as to suggest that speeding isn’t a major safety concern, which is in complete discordance with the familiar refrain of every single speeding-related PR campaign ever. MPI even warns that speed increases stopping distance. But as we know, that doesn’t matter when it comes to setting amber light duration.
The Court of Queen’s Bench case is critical because if Christian wins, it could topple the entire house of cards. Beyond the consequences for the Crown, it could change the way the entire justice system works in Manitoba, as it would establish that an accused appealing any provincial offence (not just a traffic ticket), can choose anyone to represent them. Despite all the law being overwhelmingly in his favour and the Crown’s position being completely untenable, Christian is expected to lose. Given that the Crown’s office has been engaging in these machinations for years, the ramifications should they lose this case are severe to say the least, many of those involved could even be facing disbarment. The only reason they’ve escaped scrutiny for this long is that no one has ever challenged them to this extent, as the system makes it almost impossible.
Luckily, if the QB case is lost, the issue will be taken even higher to the Court of Appeal, where in theory, there should be fewer conflicts of interest favouring the Crown because it’s further away from the money, so to speak (Manitoba makes millions on traffic tickets). Ironically, by refusing to allow Christian to continue representing accused in traffic court and forcing the issue to a higher one, the Crown has risked complete ruin by inadvertently putting the spotlight on these unbelievable tactics — the extent and prevalence of which has been enough to surprise even a sociology professor, which is saying something.
Christian is finally making some headway, and media are starting to take notice. A lot of people are visibly and rightfully upset, including a growing number of students and faculty from the University of Manitoba School of Law, and every class of 50+ university students Christian speaks to. But more public awareness and support is sorely needed. On February 12th, 2019, Curtis Pankratz read his students a letter he filed with The Law Society of Manitoba regarding the misrepresentation of his wife’s traffic case by Manitoba Prosecution Services. Afterwards, he made a very compelling plea for us to help defend our legal rights by telling our friends and family about what’s going on, sharing on social media, and generally making a stink. I think it’s the least we can do.
This isn’t just about unfair traffic tickets, but we really, really love to complain about them. It would be remiss of us not to jump at the chance to do something about it. And if we’re loud enough, we just might end up holding our judicial system accountable for its reprehensible actions against the very people it is supposed to serve (that’s you). So please, if you’ve read this far, do yourself a solid and take another minute to share this with as many people as you can. At the very least, you’ll be doing a public service by spreading the word that Winnipeggers aren’t all terrible drivers… it’s engineered.
- *03/18/19 – in response to some really useful feedback, a few edits have been made for the sake of clarity and to correct grammar and spelling.**
