Funding Edmonton’s traffic safety services has become more of a challenge ever since the Alberta government required municipalities to pull a number of photo radar sites, according to a city official.

In 2024, the province vowed to scale back photo radar sites by 70 per cent. In response, in the summer of 2025, Edmonton pulled automated enforcement from playground and school zones and other intersections.

Jordana Kulchar, the city’s acting director for safe mobility, told CBC News in a statement that automated enforcement revenue was already on the decline since 2019, due to an “increased portion of revenue retained by the government of Alberta, restrictions on the use of automated enforcement and reduced traffic volumes during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

She said the city’s Traffic Safety and Automated Enforcement Reserve funds municipal programs like Safe Crossings, Safe Routes to School, Street Labs and other critical road safety upgrades and initiatives. 

Ward O-day’min Coun. Anne Stevenson said she estimates that tens of millions of dollars have been lost as a result of the restrictions put on the city’s ability to collect photo radar revenue.

“In the absence of that dedicated funding, we’ve had to find other revenue sources,” she said in an interview. 

“That’s meant either reallocating [funding] from other areas or, you know, it’s part of what’s led to some of the pressures on our property taxes.”

Stevenson said there aren’t a lot of options to find that funding elsewhere because the city’s budget is so tight. 

Photo radar one of few reliable revenue streams: expert

University of Alberta urban planning professor Paul Boniface Akaabre said photo radar is one of the few stable revenue sources that municipalities tend to rely on.

“At the end of the day, you are taking a revenue source that was being borne by few people who break offences, and now their burden is coming to everybody,” he said.

Akaabre said it’s most likely Edmontonians who will need to pay the difference, through more municipal fees and property taxes. He said it could also mean the city might need to scale back on certain capital projects.

“That has a consequence because when you are scaling back certain projects … there will be even more maintenance of certain infrastructures [which] will have to be pushed forward. And that could really reduce the efficiency of that particular infrastructure,” Akaabre said.

He said the onus shouldn’t fall on municipalities to scrape up funding to replace photo radar revenue. 

When the province first announced plans to cut back on municipalities’ use of photo radar in 2024, Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen said at the time the step was being taken “to ensure that photo radar is a tool for protecting people, not a government cash cow.”

Akaabre said automated traffic enforcement and traffic safety are a shared responsibility between the municipalities and the province. 

“We need to create some kind of subsidiary income that will make sure that you continuously have that revenue stream flowing,” Akaabre said.

Last week, city council passed a motion to look into possible updates on traffic fines.

Stevenson said this could help fill in revenue gaps indirectly. 

“Some of our fines haven’t increased in quite some time. So just ensuring that those are aligned with our current standards,” she said. 

“We never want to be using fines as revenue sources, but we want to make sure that those fines are aligned and effective deterrence to behaviour.”

A spokesperson for Alberta’s transportation ministry told CBC News in a statement that the government has no plans to roll back its photo radar restrictions. It said the government has established a Traffic Safety Fund, which would help municipalities improve high-risk intersections.

“We continue to support police-led enforcement efforts and data-driven safety solutions, while ensuring traffic safety tools are focused on reducing dangerous behaviour,” the statement reads.