Toronto’s busiest speed camera was beheaded for the third time in two months — and the remains were thrown into the High Park duck pond.
The camera at Parkside Drive near Algonquin Avenue was cut down sometime early Sunday morning, according to Faraz Gholizadeh, a local resident and co-chair of the Safe Parkside community group.
Parkside Drive sits just east of High Park. It’s a major north-south thoroughfare connecting Bloor Street to Lake Shore Drive and the Gardiner Expressway
Whoever did it “must be very offended by the presence of this camera, which is unfortunate because it’s there for safety purposes,” Gholizadeh said.
When the last two incidents occurred in November, the camera was left on the ground next to the pole. This time, however, the camera was transported a few hundred metres away and left in a pond — where it remained partially submerged on Monday afternoon.
Faint tracks were still visible showing the path the vandal or vandals took from the camera’s former pole to the pond. A segment of one of the camera’s internal wires was also left on the path.
Gholizadeh said he feels “frustration and disappointment” but “also a little bit of humour” at the situation.
“Ultimately, whether the camera is in a pond or whether it’s upright on Parkside, it’s not really achieving the goal of making the street safe,” he said.
A spokesperson for the City of Toronto said the city “condemns all acts of theft and vandalism.”
The city doesn’t own the cameras because it’s a vendor-provided service and all repair costs are incurred by the vendor, the spokesperson said. The camera company has to replace it within 30 days.
The city is also looking at mounting new cameras on hydro poles and other ways to surveil the area to “help alleviate some of the vandalism issues.”
When it’s operational, the camera dishes out far more speeding tickets than any of the other 75 in the city.
As of the end of October, it had issued over 65,000 tickets since April 2022.
The second-place camera on Leslie Street north of Overland Drive has issued over 25,000 tickets since May 2024.
Gholizadeh and the Safe Parkside group have long advocated for other speed-calming measures. On Monday, he said his primary concern isn’t that the camera was cut down.
“It’s with the city that is so slow to act on addressing safety on Parkside,” he said.
Three people have been killed and five seriously injured in nearly 1,500 collisions along the street in the last 10 years. The camera was put up in 2021 after two people were killed in a crash.
“Narrow and missing sidewalks, lack of bikeways, excessive vehicular speeds and aggressive driving” are commonplace on Parkside Drive, staff said in a report.
Since then, the city has taken several steps to slow traffic, including reducing speed limits from 50 to 40 kilometres per hour for the 21,000 cars that use the street every day.
The biggest move came in November when councillors voted to continue studying whether to alter the street and construct nearly two kilometres of bidirectional bike lanes — even in the face of a provincial law that limits bike lane expansion.
“Parkside is an urgent and necessary investment not just for bikes but also for safety,” Parkdale-High Park Coun. Gord Perks said in November.
Once the planning phase is complete, councillors will vote on whether to go forward with the changes at an estimated cost of $7.5 million.
