Joe McWilliams
The skeptics are saying – predictably – that the Town of Slave Lake’s lower default speed limit is nothing but a cash grab.
Is it?
You would have to look into the motives of each councillor and senior management type to know that for sure. Since you can’t do that, but you need to have an opinion, out it comes, according to your attitude, temperament. . .whatever.
More likely is that most of the people involved in making the decision to go to 40 km/hr from 50 km/hr are doing it because they think it will make the streets safer.
Not that having an eye on the bottom line is a bad reason, per se. It’s just very hard for me to imagine the council members and CAO huddling, in closed session, and saying, “OK, we need to get the budget back in the black. How can we do it? More speed fines! Yeah, let’s lower the speed limit and see how many bucks that can generate!”
But some have no trouble at all imagining that sort of scenario, and worse.
M.D. council has its own array of skeptical observers. They never miss a chance to declare whatever the M.D. does as being in a range running from insincere to incompetent.
Probably a similar dynamic exists between every municipal government and the people they serve.
Getting back to the new speed limits, will they make a difference? Will they be unbearably oppressive? Will they cause people to be late for work?
Probably not, or not much, in every case. We’ll get used to them. Most people will mostly obey, most of the time. And who knows: somebody going 40 might stop an inch short of running over a child on a bicycle whereas if they had been doing 50 they would have taken that much farther to stop.
You never know.
Speed limits are a restriction on freedom, if you want to look at it that way. They amount to the people we elect telling us, “We don’t trust you to do the right thing.”
This is kind of annoying, but apparently necessary.
If the law isn’t laid down, with suitable penalties, it will be the law of the jungle all over again, and tough luck to you if you get run over.
So what do we do? If something is unacceptable, we can always raise a petition, or take to the streets with signs. Get on the agenda and let council know exactly what we think. The system allows for that.