Matthieu Gagnon, Vice President
The City has released a report for the harmonization of speed limits along Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard, which was approved by the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee on October 23, 2025. The Community Association presented a delegation at that meeting. This article is to present the position of the Community Association which was shared at that committee.
The report recommends a speed limit of 50 km/hour from St-Joseph to just north of the overpass, 40 km/h from north of the overpass to near Tenth Line, and 50 km/h from near Tenth Line to Inlet Private. Those speed limits are in line with regulations on the speed limits around schools and make sense given that condition. The Convent Glen – Orléans Wood Community Association supports those changes and appreciates the efforts that councillors Luloff and Dudas have put on this file to make driving the legal speed on Jeanne d’Arc less confusing. However, the speed at which people drive is not dictated by the speed limit, but by the design of the road, as explained by this great video by Justine Underhill. We are not concerned with travel time since the drive from the fire station to Tenth Line and Jeanne d’Arc is 7 minutes. A rise in travel time of 30% (by going from 60 km/h to 40 km/h) is not very significant even though it will feel very slow for drivers.
Jeanne d’Arc has a lot of sections that are wide and straight with a large right of way. This is best illustrated by the section near Terry Fox Elementary School. The cross section of the roadway is 14.5m, and includes four traffic lanes. You can get a feel from Figure 2 below that these large lanes make driving above 40 km/h feel very safe even though it is unsafe for people (including children, whether they are there for school or not) outside of cars.
If you look at the data from speed cameras around the city (Figure 3), you can see that the speed camera at Jeanne d’Arc in front of the school is in the top ten busiest cameras in the city. It is ranked among major arterials such as Hunt Club and Walkley Roads despite seeing much lower traffic volumes. This is a quiet neighbourhood collector. If it was designed properly, people would not speed through at such high rates. The design of the road tricks us into breaking the speed limit, because the only thing telling us to slow down is a sign that can easily be missed. There is nothing in the design telling drivers to slow down. Note that the Ford Government has introduced legislation to bad speed camera, so the only traffic calming option used on Jeanne d’Arc will no longer be available.
There are measures that could be quickly implemented to make our roads safer. As part of a recent study for active transportation infrastructure along Orléans Boulevard, a traffic count was done showing that, at peak levels, traffic near Terry Fox Elementary school tops at about 850 cars per hour. A traffic lane can easily accommodate 1000 vehicles per hour. The road is overbuilt and does not require four lanes of traffic. The city could quickly block a lane of traffic using something as basic as flexisticks. Closing the lane could also benefit kids going to school since it could be converted to a makeshift bike lane. This could benefit everyone without impeding traffic. We would like city staff to present us with options to reduce the design speed of Jeanne d’Arc.
These measures could be implemented using the funds collected from the traffic tickets issued by the camera. The revenue from those cameras is supposed to go towards street safety initiatives like those mentioned above. Our area has not seen any road safety improvements except for the limited infrastructure built around the Jeanne d’Arc overpass as part of the LRT project. The revenue from traffic cameras should be going to make Jeanne d’Arc safer.
As a community association, we would like to see the city explore quick solutions to calm the traffic along Jeanne d’Arc that are design-focused as opposed to enforcement focus. The city can cheaply do better to ensure the safety of our children than simply changing a speed limit sign. Automated traffic cameras should be focused on dangerous driving that is not induced by poor design, but by genuine reckless behaviour. Let’s make sure the city does something that will actually reduce speeds along Jeanne d’Arc beyond sending us traffic tickets.
Pumpkin Alley (Nov 1)
