Coun. Raj Dhaliwal said the vehicle noise is keeping Ward 5 residents up at night.
That’s why he asked about the progress of the City of Calgary’s Traffic Safety Team and its work in cracking down on noisy vehicles.
Dhaliwal said with the nice weather, they’re seeing a big spike in Ward 5 complaints regarding noisy vehicles with altered or modified mufflers. It’s happening in Skyview Ranch, Redstone, Saddle Ridge, Cornerstone and Cityscape, he said.
“We are frustrated. We are losing our sleeps. We are we don’t feel safe. Sometimes these noises are like a firearm going off,” Dhaliwal said during Question Period at the May 6, 2025, Public Hearing Meeting of Calgary city council.
To that end, Dhaliwal asked about the noise recording meters being added around Calgary and the number of tickets that have been issued by the Traffic Safety Team.
The City’s Traffic Safety Team was established at the end of March with eight peace officers. Its mandate is to enforce speeding, excessive vehicle noise, parking violations and other traffic-related offenses, according to the City of Calgary website.
Community Services GM Katie Black acknowledged the “very troubling situation” for Ward 5 residents. She said that, thus far, the team has been focused on education, training and enforcement in school zones and other low-speed settings.
“So far in this short time, the team has issued 600 tickets. Eighty-nine of those tickets were in Ward 5, with an additional 87 warnings in Ward 5, and that’s been focused for Ward 5 in areas around local schools, seven local schools,” Black told councillors.
Noise monitoring devices are deployed across Calgary
GM Black said that noise monitoring devices have been deployed in 15 locations around Calgary. She said that five of those have been installed in Ward 5. Ten more of the devices are expected to be installed through the spring.
When the Traffic Safety Team was launched, officers said that they would be collecting data from across Calgary to see where the issues are with loud noises.
GM Black said that’s the work that’s underway.
Right now, we’re in the process of gathering data from those devices, making sure that they are working optimally, so that as the warm weather comes and as especially as children are out of school, the team will turn its attention to really focus on the noise bylaw and making sure that we’re keeping communities not only safe but also at a reasonable volume,” she said.
Coun. Dhaliwal said that after hearing Black’s response, he was cautiously optimistic that more would be done. He said the data already shows that Ward 5 is a problem noise area.
“You saw five of them are in my ward, so it tells me, based on the data, that my ward is a problem, right? And, I want to see more. I want to see presence on the ground,” he said.
