A new front has opened up in the war for our roads
When Julie West first saw the 30-kilometre-an-hour speed limit signs popping up along one of the busiest commuter roads in her south Edmonton suburb this fall, she was flabbergasted.
“I thought, ‘How the heck did I miss this?’” said West, who is plugged into her community and civic politics as vice-president of the Yellowbird Community League.
In mid-September, Edmonton city council approved a new citywide speed limit of 30 km/h on roads next to hundreds of playgrounds and playing fields. Evidently the word failed to get out to everyone.
In fact, when West asked around her neighbourhood about the new limit on the collector road beside Kaskitayo Park, no one had seen or heard the city’s rationale.
Residents had long wanted traffic-calming measures of some form on some residential streets in the area where drivers speed, West said, but no one had ever asked the city for a radically lower limit on the 50 km/h commuter road around the massive park, where there’s no playground equipment and children rarely play.
“The only times there are people in that field is for adult sports games, adult baseball or adult ultimate,” said West, who has 10-year-old twin boys. “There’s never child events there. The kids don’t play there at all.
“It is frustrating,” she said of the new limit. “When you want to be the safe driver, when you have kids and you know there are other kids nearby and you want to drive safely, I wouldn’t have a problem driving 30 and I’d feel glad about it if I recognized it made sense.
“But driving around that great big field, particularly when it’s completely unused in winter, there’s nobody there, it just doesn’t make sense to go 30.”
West isn’t alone in her frustration. During the civic election, the new 30 km/h zones were the biggest issues for suburban voters in his ward, Coun. Michael Walters said.
Indeed, the issue is the latest skirmish in Edmonton’s war of the roads, which often pits the interests of drivers, transit users, cyclists and pedestrians against one another.
The war is a new one. There was no real conflict for the many decades when cars were king and pedestrians were nervous.
For generations, suburbs were designed for a car lifestyle, with collector and arterial roads built for speed.
If someone like former councillor and environmental activist Tooker Gomberg advocated for cycling infrastructure, he was regarded as a radical, not a visionary.
And whenever any individual or group pushed council to bring in lower speed limits around schools, council rebuffed them, instead taking the advice of city transportation engineers who insisted there would be no increased safety with such a move, just increased driver frustration.
In the last 10 years, however, a coalition of pedestrians, mass transit users, cyclists, traffic safety officials and a majority on council have pushed back hard against the car-centric establishment. They’ve made some major and necessary improvements, but not without taking some missteps.
The overzealous creation of 30 km/h zones on hundreds of green spaces in residential neighbourhoods appears to be another.
This week, council approved a motion by Walters to take another look at these playground zones and perhaps restrict the 30 km/h limit to places where there are actual children playing on playground equipment.
This is what Walters and other councillors thought they were approving in the first place.
“There was a misunderstanding about how broadly this was going to be defined by many on council, maybe not by all on council,” Walters said.
“Communities don’t see the logic in having long stretches of collector roads by underutilized or non-utilized parks being 30 km/h, and this needs to lead into the longer-term plan for speed management and traffic safety in Edmonton.”
What Walters doesn’t want is the zones remaining in places where they don’t belong, then aggressive photo radar enforcement being set up. Such a plan would breed cynicism about photo radar being used inappropriately to raise money, Walters said.
As for the longer-term plan, Walters said evidence supports moving to as low as 30 km/h on residential streets, then to 50 or even 60 km/h on suburban collector roads, except in the vicinity of schools and playground equipment, and then to possibly higher speeds on arterial roads.
“Some of those speeds could be increased in my view because they are designed for higher speed than they are currently signed at,” he said.
Walters’s plan is a sound one. It’s going to be a battle to get lower residential limits as well as some higher collector and arterial speed limits, but that’s the good fight in this ongoing war.