"It doesn't matter, no kids are around anyway" is the standard reply when people complain about speeding without enforcement. Toronto's own Watch Your Speed sign data — every vehicle, every hour, all of 2023, the most recent year the City has published in detail — says the opposite. The peak per-hour rate of the most extreme speeders is 6 am, the start of school commutes. Total speeding peaks at 4 pm, when schools let out. The "no one is around" defence ignores when these drivers actually drive.
Skeptics of camera enforcement often grant that speeding is high, but argue it's high "at times that don't matter" — overnight, when no one is around. The 2023 hourly data flatly contradicts that framing. The school-day window — Mon–Fri 8 am to 3 pm — is 20.8% of the week's hours. Here's how much of each speeding tier actually happened inside it:
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share of all 30+ km/h-over speeding measured outside school hours — and the most extreme tier peaks per-hour at 6 am
The "school hours" cut-off used here is Mon–Fri 8 am to 3 pm — wider than the actual school day, deliberately so the comparison is conservative. The headline isn't that "all speeding happens during school hours" — it's that the inverse claim ("none of it does, so it doesn't matter") doesn't survive contact with the City's own hourly counts.
Each curve is the city-wide total of vehicles measured at that speed tier across roughly 650 Watch Your Speed signs, summed by hour. The shaded band is the Mon–Fri 8 am – 3 pm "school" window.
The 10+ over curve tracks traffic volume — it peaks at 16:00, exactly when schools let out and after-school activity is at its highest. The 30+ over curve (the most dangerous tier) has two daily peaks per hour: 6 am, when school commutes begin, and 10 pm, when evening activities end and teenagers come home. The deep-overnight hours (1–4 am) have lower total volumes but also high rates per car — these are the conditions where a single bad outcome is most likely to be fatal.
Saturday isn't a "no kids" day. Sunday isn't either. Kids walk to parks. Seniors cross streets to grocery stores. The Watch Your Speed signs were watching all seven days of the week in 2023, and here is what they saw at 10+, 20+, and 30+ over:
The pattern is similar across the city: weekend speeding at the extreme tiers is on par with or above weekday speeding, even though the "school hours" framing implicitly treats Saturday and Sunday as somehow lower-stakes.
The Watch Your Speed sign program is administered by the City under the "School Safety Zone" name, but in practice the program covers a much broader set of Community Safety Zones: streets near parks, transit stops, seniors' residences, hospitals, dense residential blocks. The 1,200+ signs in the program guard the streets where people of all ages cross — not just the perimeter of school buildings.
That matters because the "no one is around" defence implicitly relies on the idea that every WYS sign protects a classroom. They don't. A driver doing 35 over the limit past a Sunday-afternoon park, or past a transit stop at 11 pm, or past a seniors' home in the early morning, is the speeding the data is overwhelmingly capturing.
Out of the ~650 signs with hourly 2023 data, here are the ones where the temporal pattern is most lopsided. Each is a real Toronto Watch Your Speed location; each shows that the worst speeding clusters at hours and days when, on the "no kids around" framing, the speeding shouldn't matter.
The hourly data above is 2023 — the camera era. The City has not yet published detailed hourly data for 2024, 2025, or 2026. What it has published is the monthly summary: total vehicles measured in each speed tier, every month, at each sign. Comparing the four months after the November 2025 ban with the same months a year earlier:
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more vehicles measured 10+ km/h over the limit, Jan–Jun 2026 vs 2025
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more measured 30+ km/h over the limit — the most dangerous tier
That post-ban rise is across all 24 hours of the day, because the City's monthly summary doesn't separate hours. But the deterrent removed by the ban — the threat of an automated ticket arriving in the mail — operated equally on every hour of the day. There is no plausible mechanism by which removing 24-hour enforcement would lift only the overnight hours and leave morning school-commute hours untouched. The most reasonable inference is that school-hour speeding is up too, by something close to the same multiple — we just don't yet have the hour-resolved data to prove it directly.
The "no kids around" defence does double work: it ignores who else uses the street, and it ignores that the cameras deterred speeding at every hour, not only the ones with children present.
The hourly figures on this page come from the City's School Safety Zone Watch Your Speed Program – Detailed Speed Counts dataset, 2023 file (the most recent year available; the City has not yet published 2024, 2025, or 2026 detailed counts). Each row is one sign, one hour, one 5 km/h speed bin, and a vehicle count. Speed-over-limit tiers are computed by subtracting each sign's posted limit. "Outside school hours" is everything except Monday–Friday 08:00–14:59 local time.
The post-ban comparison on the previous chapter is from the monthly summary file — the same file that powers the rest of this site. That comparison uses the most recent published months (currently Jan–Jun 2026), against the same 2025 months, across the 700+ signs that reported in both windows. The claim that school-hour speeding is up post-ban is inferential, drawn from the 24/7 monthly totals; it cannot be measured directly until the City publishes 2024+ hourly data.
Construction and analysis are AI-assisted. The data and the code are public — verify any number yourself.