Toronto's most notorious speed camera sawed down by vandals for the umpteenth time

Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras in and around Toronto are quite prone to being toppled or defaced by angry motorists and passersby who see them as a symbol of a police state, but there's one device in particular that has been targeted not once, but no less than five times in the last few months.

The Parkside Drive camera has been blinded by spray paint, cut down multiple times, and even at one point tossed into a pond in nearby High Park.

And, despite the City's efforts to keep the camera in operation — it being Toronto's most productive, raking in more than $7.2 million in fines over 3.5 years in operation — people just keep knocking it out of commission, including again this week.

Safe Parkside, a grassroots group that has long pushed for increased safety measures along the north-south roadway, shared the news (and their frustration) on Friday morning.

"The Parkside Drive speed camera was just cut down for a fifth time in recent months, leaving this dangerous street with little in the form of safety once again," members wrote.

"The lack of meaningful safety measures remains a big concern on Parkside Drive, a street that borders the city's busiest park, High Park, on the west side and is lined with residential family homes on the east side."

The organization then pointed the finger at the City for the ongoing issue, as well as the time it takes to repair the tech each time, stating that "despite Parkside Drive's long and deadly history of speeding, the City of Toronto continues to overlook safety on Parkside Drive year after year."

The street, which now has a posted speed limit of 40 km/h, has been the site of seven major collisions in the last decade, which resulted in three fatalities and five serious injuries.

Safe Parkside said the camera in question, which was installed in fall 2021, has nabbed drivers flying at as fast as a whopping 154 km/h, or four times the limit, which they feel "underlines the urgent need for a redesign of this deadly street."

While the City pays around $50,000 per year to operate and generally maintain each piece of ASE equipment, it has told blogTO in the past that the costs associated with fixing destroyed machines are actually covered by the camera company as part of the vendor-provided service.

In 2022, two years after the first of the ASE tech was installed around the city, there were 408 reported instances of camera tampering. That number more than doubled to 851 in 2023.