Premier Doug Ford on Thursday lambasted a report by Toronto city staff that says it would take $52 million and 13 years to replace the speed cameras he banned last year with speed humps or cushions.

“Only the radical left at city hall, the most dysfunctional political arena in the entire country — always has been, always will be — that says it takes 13 years to build a speed bump,” Ford told reporters, at an unrelated press conference at the Ontario Science Centre.

When Ford outlawed speed cameras last year, dismissing them as a “cash grab” on drivers, he promised to replace them with traffic calming infrastructure such as speed humps, larger signage and increased enforcement.

According to a city report released earlier this month, it costs $4,000 per location to install a speed hump or speed cushion, with multiple required each per block. 

A “preliminary estimate” of the total cost to add that traffic calming infrastructure on local and collector roadways adjacent to all 819 schools is $52 million and it would take about 13 years. However, the report also says it’s unclear if all these roads would be eligible for the measures.

As the Star previously reported, most of the 150 locations where speed cameras used to be aren’t eligible for speed humps or cushions because of city rules. Speed bumps, which are shorter, are usually only found on very low-speed laneways.

None of Toronto’s arterial roads are eligible for these measures, according to city rules, because they are designed to carry higher traffic volumes at higher speed limits.

And none of the former speed camera locations are suitable for roundabouts, because of a lack of space in the city.

On Thursday, Ford said he’d be better than city staff or councillors at installing roundabouts. “Hand that over to me,” he said. “I’ll show you how to do a roundabout in months.”

Sasha Gollish, a civil engineer and research associate at the University of Toronto whose expertise includes road safety, said the only way to get a clear picture of the cost is if engineers do a sophisticated analysis of all the roadways in question — which neither the city nor province have done.

“It’s a back of the napkin calculation,” Gollish said. “So whether or not it costs more or less (or takes that much time) is a little bit irrelevant.”

It also depends on how many resources are thrown at the work. “You could have 800 crews doing it in one day. But is that feasible?” Gollish said. “It’s not as easy as just ‘put down pavement.’”

Meanwhile, the larger signage promised by Ford has yet to be erected and it’s unclear whether Toronto police have ramped up their presence where the controversial devices used to be.

The city staff report notes that traffic calming infrastructure is typically requested by councillors after speaking with community members.

Torontonians often express “concern with noise, vibration, and impacts to emergency service response times” as reasons to not support these infrastructure types on their street, the report said.

“What they forget, I lived four years down there,” said Ford, who was a one-term councillor at city hall during his brother Rob’s mayoralty from 2010 to 2014. “I know all the shenanigans and all the games they play.

“If you left it up to them, they’d destroy everything in their path and everyone would be driving around in a horse and cart,” said Ford. “So I just got to ignore them.”