Are Ontario’s new 110 km/h speed limits dangerous?

I know the gym's not meant to be easy, but man, [groans] in winter, doing it in the dark is hard. Doing it alone is hard. Doing it cold is hard. Doing it when you don't want to is hard. Even doing it when you do is hard. Doing it when it's too early for this is hard. Doing it when there's every reason not to is hard. Doing it again and again and again is hard, and we wouldn't wanna be doing anything else. Gymshark, we do gym.

[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current podcast.

I do a lot of highway driving, so the faster I go, the better.

I guess who wants to speed at highway will do it regardless of the, the limits. I think 100, it's kind of low. I don't see, like, a very direct impact on having less accidents, so I think 110 makes kind of sense.

I think everybody was already speeding anyways, so it's just gonna be up to that limit, so I'm okay with that. Because I've never seen anybody driving below 100. You can see people going 140.

As long as the people who wanna drive a little bit slower just stay on the right side. [laughs] If you wanna pass the lane, go on the left. Don't be slow on the left lane. That's all I really care about.

You know, 110 makes sense to me, man. Everybody's doing that anyways, man. Bring it up. Yeah.

Those are people in Toronto weighing in on the province of Ontario's new speed limit. As of last week, several stretches of highway have increased the limit from 100 to 110 kilometers an hour. That means drivers can go that fast on almost 90% of the highways in that province, and it has at least some people worried about safety.

Speed kills, right? I think the faster you're going, the more that people's lives are in danger. I wanna ensure that if people are driving faster, they're not distracted and paying attention to the road.

The Ontario government says the change will help people get where they're going faster and that it's safe because the highways were designed to handle higher speeds. Stephanie Cowle is director at Parachute Canada. It's a national organization that focuses, in some part, on road safety, and she joins us now. Stephanie, good morning.

Uh, good morning, Matt.

The Ontario government says that this increase is safe. Is it safe?

Evidence shows us that higher speeds are related to increased serious injury and death, and we have good evidence from here in Canada that increasing highway speeds will lead to more deaths on our roads.

What do we know about that? A- again, going from 100 to 110 kilometers an hour, how much of a risk does, does, does that increase?

Hmm. So, um, the, the connection between crash risk and speed increase is understood to be exponential, um, so the more we increase, the higher that risk goes. Um, and the World Health Organization's, um, estimate's that about a 10% increase in speed can increase crash risk by close to 50%. Um, you know, when speed increases, the laws of physics don't change. Higher speeds mean longer stopping distance, less time to react, and greater forces, uh, when vehicles do crash.

We know, I think anybody who drives on highways in this country knows, that even at a speed limit of 100 kilometers an hour, some, many, the majority