1 speeding ticket issued every 3 minutes during Deerfoot Trail crackdown

A weekend crackdown on speeding on Deerfoot Trail shows the freeway is living up to its reputation as the Deerfoot 500 — and that bothers the police.

Officers wrote up 60 tickets during a three-hour control blitz this weekend. The average speeder was clocked at 125 kilometres an hour, but the fastest was pulled over for doing 157. The posted limit is 100 kilometres an hour.

Staff Sgt. Paul Stacey says they should not have to write a ticket every three minutes.

“The surprise is that we wrote that many tickets and actually it just reinforces the fact that we need to be out there doing this more often.”

“What you have is you have traffic flow that's going approximately the speed limit and then you have your one or two vehicles that are going well above that. It surprises people. People aren't accounting for that and the people that are speeding at those speeds, they also can't predict what other people are going to do and it reduces their time to react so — extremely dangerous."

Residential roads

And it's not just the freeways that are a concern.

Dale Calkins is with a group pushing for the speed limit to be reduced on residential roads from 50 to 30 kilometres an hour.

“Thirty kilometre an hour speed limits can significantly cut down on the likelihood and the severity of collisions and they really cut down on potentially fatal collisions.”

Although some members of city council are interested in the idea, Calkins says an across the board lowering of residential speeds limits would be up to the provincial government.