Fremont spending on speed devices
City already has 14 signs installed, adding 30 more in attempt to slow drivers
FREMONT >> In an attempt to slow down drivers on major roads and near schools, Fremont is doubling down on radar speed signs, spending nearly $150,000 to add 30 more to the city’s arsenal.
The signs will send motorists’ recorded speeds to the city in real time so police can use that information in deciding where to target enforcement. Fremont already has 14 speed signs that it installed incrementally through September.
The Fremont City Council unanimously approved the bulk purchase of the additional signs at a meeting earlier this month.
“The goal is really just to bring awareness to the level of speed vehicles are going so that motorists are aware of their speed and potentially have the ability and the decision-making process to slow down their speeds,” Noe Veloso, the city’s assistant city engineer, said in an interview.
Veloso said the new signs — which flash a car’s mph back to drivers and display a white strobe when speeding is detected — will be installed on “high-speed” arterial streets where the city has seen the highest numbers of “severe injury and fatal collisions.”
A staff report indicates some of those streets will include Niles Boulevard, near where a woman was killed in a hit-and-run in late November, as well as other spots on Fremont Boulevard; Paseo Padre
Parkway, where a couple of signs are already posted; and Thornton Avenue, among others.
Veloso said speed is a major factor in determining whether someone survives being hit, so the signs could “help save lives” as part of the city’s broader Vision Zero plan to slow traffic with narrower lanes and intersections, enhanced crosswalks and speed limit reductions.
Since the city began implementing its Vision Zero plan in 2016, staffers say major crashes through November are down 46% on roads with speed limits above 40 mph compared with numbers from 2013 to 2015.
However, the numbers of fatalities from collisions are mixed, hitting a low of four deaths each in 2016 and 2018 and reaching a high of 10 in 2017 and seven in 2019.
Nine of 10 people hit by a car traveling 20 mph survive, according to the city staff report, but the survival rate drops by half when the speed is 30 mph and down to 10% at 40 mph.
“Each of these units has a modem, and the cell service then connects all of the data the sign collects to a cloud service, and that’s where all of the data is stored for us to then retrieve and analyze,” Veloso said.
The Public Works Department staff analyzes the speed data sent to the city every 15 minutes, but police don’t have access to the realtime data. Veloso said “that is something we can discuss with them down the road.”
“We do look at this weekly, and what we really look for is not the one-time egregious speeder, but is there a sense that there’s a speeding problem along this roadway,” Veloso said.
“And are there specific time frames, is there a pattern that then we could provide to the traffic unit?” he added.
Veloso said Public Works has informed police only once so far about a speeding problem reflected in the sign data — near Weibel Elementary School, where over a three-week period there was excessive speeding during school hours.
With more signs set to go up along high-speed roadways, Veloso said it will “allow us to then conduct more citywide enforcement” and “really increase our vision of enforcing speeding in a more targeted way with the Police Department.”
The initial 14 signs cost the city about $4,700 each, Veloso said, adding that includes the cost of the first year of cell service needed to transmit the data, for a total of nearly $66,000. However, Veloso said, a few developers have picked up the cost of some of the signs when building residential units near major roadways.
Each of the previously installed signs and the 30 new ones will cost about $400 per year to keep the cell service active, he said.
The installation costs have not yet been determined, but Veloso said the amount would be “nominal” to hang one up on a light pole or elsewhere.
The city staff hopes to install the first five new signs by the end of January and the rest by the middle of next year.