Like most drivers in St. Albert, I find I need to keep my eyes glued to the road, constantly. The reason for this attention is the fact that our city’s roadways offer an ever changing buffet of potholes, manhole cover depressions, bomb craters, cracks, crevices, canyons, bottomless pits, and other dangers that virtually guarantee a damaged vehicle, if one is not quick enough to identify the danger and swerve out of the way. While Edmonton’s roadways are in a poor state of repair as well, few of them offer the challenge provided by St. Albert’s obstacle courses.
For a long time, I assumed that this lack of road repair simply reflected the desire of the city’s administration to save some money and delay needed repairs. While council always seems to have enough money to pursue some ‘pie in the sky’ goofy social cause, they remain unable to provide many of the traditional services that governments were first created to provide for the public good. As I said, I had assumed that crumbling roads reflected a simple budgeting problem. However, recent events have convinced me that permitting our roads to deteriorate is part of a far larger, and far more insidious process. Let me explain.
On a recent road journey through St. Albert, I ended up in the very unusual position of being a passenger in the vehicle, rather than its driver. Naturally, I couldn’t speak to the driver, as he was totally focused on observing the road conditions, and then rapidly changing directions to avoid being sucked into the bowels of the earth. Since conversation was out of the question, I had little else to do, so I began observing the scenery around me. Instead of being focused on the road, as I usually was, this time I was free to just look around. It was this looking around that caused me to uncover the insidious plot previously mentioned, for as I looked around, I discovered that many of the intersections in St. Albert are monitored by a vast army of cameras.
On average, I found between eight to 10 cameras per intersection. While I’ve heard rumours of up to 12 cameras in some locations, the maximum I’ve seen is 10. Some of these are, of course, red light cameras, but the majority of them are not for monitoring drivers who go through red lights. If I knew the purpose for all these thousands of cameras throughout St. Albert, I might be less concerned, but the city has not seen fit to provide the great ‘unwashed’ citizens with any information or explanation for this explosion of camera monitoring.
With no explanation available, I’ve been forced to determine the most likely uses for such cameras, and after considering hundreds of potential reasons, I believe there are three valid purposes:
1. The cameras are for monitoring any ‘riff raff’ that attempts to move into St Albert, (such as the poor, the unemployed, the sick, or the homeless) so that they may be caught and returned to the wilderness of Edmonton or other locales.
2. Alternatively, the cameras may be for preventing people from leaving St. Albert. In particular, with the city’s desperate dream of building a commercial tax base within our borders, a system that identified any business owners trying to escape would be highly valuable.
3. Finally, the answer may have nothing to do with coming or going, and everything to do with collecting more revenue. Specifically, a comprehensive camera system will be able to identify individual drivers so that a daily road use toll can be invoiced and mailed to their residence.
The next time you drive the St. Albert Trail, go slowly and look up at the traffic lights and the street lights. I think you’ll be surprised at how many cameras are looking back at you.
Brian plans to continue living in St. Albert, despite the multiple requests from friends, family, neighbours, and city council.
