City of Kitchener councilors have voted to scrap a plan to install more speed cameras outside schools.

The speed camera program is administered by the Region of Waterloo.

At a Kitchener city council meeting Monday, fines associated with the program were discussed.

“We don’t want them to blame it on a money grab or anything like that,” Councilor Bil Ioannidis told CTV News.

Under the new program, there are no tickets like there would be for a typical speeding ticket. Instead, there is an administrative fine that costs twice as much as a traditional speeding ticket.

Ioannidis said it was too great a financial burden to bear.

“If the issue is security, then the program should be somewhat revenue neutral,” he said.

Waterloo Region said fines are set by the province and there’s nothing they can do about it.

“So we’re just following the timeline that they’ve laid out for this type of program,” said Doug Spooner, Waterloo Region’s interim transportation director.

But Spooner said the new system doesn’t carry the hidden costs of a typical speeding ticket.

“This applies to the car, not the driver. So there is no impact. Your insurance, there are no demerit points,” Spooner said.

For Spooner and the region, they are moving the plan forward throughout the rest of the region and on regionally controlled roads in Kitchener.

“A car traveling at 50 kilometers/hour in a collision with a pedestrian – the survival rate for pedestrians is 15 percent. For a car traveling at 40 kilometers per hour in a collision with a pedestrian, that figure increases from 15 to 70 percent survivability,” Spooner said.