When I was a kid, driving through a village in Maine to get to the seaside, my dad got pulled over for driving 27 miles an hour in a 25 zone. Dirty ticket. Several Quebecers have had the same treatment. Word got around and everyone stuck to the limit. Even today, the policeman of this village intercepts the culprits.
No, Americans and Ontarians are not more polite or better citizens than Quebeckers because they stop as soon as you set foot on a crosswalk. They are only subjected to a rain of fines as soon as a new law is put in place. To change habits, you have to get tough.
It is the laxity of the police that means that in Montreal, we run red lights much more than elsewhere, that we speed and that we do not respect the signs. And unfortunately, a 7-year-old girl and 49 pedestrians died in 2022. I am so sad, but also very angry with the SPVM.
And instead we try to find multiple ways to protect pedestrians, inventing more and more complicated and costly ways instead of blitzing police interventions.
To see in video