City hall declines to pick a lane to solve speeding
Residents who were shocked and angered by the possibility of lower speed limits on Saskatoon’s residential streets can perhaps find some solace in the looming demise of neighbourhood traffic reviews.
The City of Saskatoon has been staging neighbourhood traffic reviews since 2013. People show up at these meetings to complain about speeding in front of their homes.
When the city sends staff out to gauge whether the 50-kilometre-per-hour speed limit is actually being exceeded, they frequently find that speeding is not really a problem. The problem is perception, city hall has concluded, and the 50 km/h threshold no longer meets the community’s expectations.
City council still needs to render a decision on whether to move forward with a reassessment of residential speeds, but the neighbourhood traffic review system seems destined for the trash bin.
The city has conducted 40 neighbourhood traffic reviews with 10 underway this year and 22 remaining over the next two years.
After the neighbourhood review process concludes, the city will switch to a much broader method for zeroing in on traffic issues. City hall administration has identified 12 larger multi neighbourhood zones that will be the focus for future reviews.
Depending on your point of view, this means less consultation with residents because the focus will no longer fall on individual neighbourhoods, but on much larger areas.
On the other hand, residents with serious concerns can, in theory at least, have them addressed more quickly since there will only be 12 zones, rather than 72 neighbourhoods. The glacial neighbourhood traffic review process will have taken seven years when it ends in 2020.
With larger areas, there’s potential to hold more frequent reviews, which can be important in a growing city. As city administration explains it, the future larger reviews will focus more on “evidence-based traffic, cyclist, and pedestrian issues and trends.”
One way to read that is that residents’ complaints — and their voices — will play a much diminished role in the future.
The perception lingers that proposals like lower speed limits emerge from complaints by the few folks who bother to show up for neighbourhood traffic reviews. Speeding is the most common complaint and the city has conducted about 500 speed reviews as a result.
Does that mean there is widespread, citywide support for lower residential speed limits? Other cities are considering lower speed limits, so it’s not only driven by a few whiners in Saskatoon. Coun. Randy Donauer put it best when he observed that people want vehicles to drive slowly on their street, but do not want to slow down themselves on other streets.
Like Saskatoon’s road network, city hall is all over the map when it comes to addressing speeding: Lower residential speed limits, speed cameras, speed bumps, road closures.
If you look at what is being considered right now by city hall, a paranoid person could conclude we will become a community with 30 km/ h speed limits on residential roads with speed bumps and speed cameras. Pick a lane, problem solvers.
Glasgow Street emerged as a legitimate issue from the Avalon neighbourhood review. Years later, after several failed attempts to address speeding and traffic volume, the Glasgow puzzle remains unsolved.
Speed cameras and speed bumps are now being considered for Glasgow.
City hall tried to partially close Ninth Street in the Nutana neighbourhood in 2015, following a traffic review, only to have council reverse that decision. Some councillors expressed concern the reversal would damage the credibility of the traffic reviews.
Council opted again this year to partially close Ninth, on a temporary basis, despite hearing there are no issues with either traffic volume or speeding. There also appears to be neighbourhood opposition to the closure, which at least suggests the traffic review process was hijacked by a minority with a narrow concern.
City hall is reviewing how it conducts neighbourhood surveys in the wake of the Glasgow and Ninth decisions.
As for the credibility of neighbourhood traffic reviews, the approach has proven to be ineffective and divisive as it limps toward its demise.