Errant cars crumple couple’s wall 10 times in six years
In the past six years, 10 vehicles have slipped off harmless Hobin Street in Stittsville, only to land in the ditch in front of No. 99.
Most have also bashed the little brick wall that announces the home of Peggy and Patrick Kelly, who live at the memorable number. In six years, honestly, Gretzky wouldn’t hit this many posts.
But Peggy, 56, is worried about something more important than piles of broken bricks and shattered lanterns.
“Someone is going to get hurt. I keep telling them someone is going to get killed walking their dog or walking their kids to school.”
Kelly is frustrated that, after many reviews by the city, no solution is being offered to prevent cars from sliding off the road, sometimes at the very spot where pedestrians have just passed.
There is another issue crying out from the complaint, too: how do you get City Hall to actually fix anything?
She thought things had improved after the city intervened in 2011. Then came this November. Two snowfalls, two more accidents.
“The last guy who hit my wall, his mother was in my ditch two years ago,” she said one day this week.
Hobin does not look dangerous, but has a prosperous look, as befits Crossing Bridge Estates, where the lots are big and the lampposts are black-wrought repro.
Built about 30 years ago, there are big tasteful houses here with treed yards, set back from a curving street without curbs or sidewalks.
The Kellys (Patrick is president of the new Ottawa Convention Centre) first noticed trouble about six ago when, one slippery night, four cars slid into the ditch in front of the house. The Kellys were having a glass of wine by the fire, bewildered.
The pattern would stop and, in bad weather, resume. Cars, minivans, SUVs: They end up in the ditch, front end and wheels damaged, bricks scattered about the driveway. It even happened in summer once, with a vehicle landing on the neighbour’s lawn.
“I will not walk on this road and I live in this neighbourhood.”
In a quick visual inspection, it is difficult to see what the problem is. Coming eastbound on Hobin toward 99 and 101 — the direction from which the trouble originates — the street certainly curves at a moderate angle, but nothing looks hazardous.
The road is fairly flat, the sightlines half-decent.
In 2011, the city sent out a couple of experts. The result was a reduction in speed limit to 30 k/h around the curve, the posting of new signs, and a freshly-painted yellow line down the middle of the road.
Kelly and others proposed two more ideas: one or more speed bumps and/or a stop sign at the closest intersection. The city shot them down. The stop sign didn’t meet so-called “warrants” on traffic volume and, without curbs, the speed bump could be semi-driven around, creating another danger.
Speed and driver error are suspected to the main problems. Hobin is mostly a local street, but there is extra traffic created by the presence of A. Lorne Cassidy Elementary School and Stittsville Cooperative Nursery.
Kelly and neighbour Caroline Borecky, at 101, will both tell you that motorists do not take kindly to suggestions to slow down.
“If we tell people to slow down, we get the finger,” said Borecky, 57.
Coun. Shad Qadri sympathizes. He had the city’s traffic specialists visit the site and plans to ask them to have another look. “They looked at the sightlines, the driveability of the road and they really didn’t identify any issues.”
The engineering opinion is that stop signs are not the answer.
“You shouldn’t be controlling the speed limit on a road with stop signs. That’s not the purpose of a stop sign,” he said.
The argument is weakened, however, by the presence of at least three speed bumps on nearby Renshaw Avenue, which intersects Hobin but has lighter traffic.
Coun. Qadri said the longterm solution might be to “urbanize” Hobin, meaning to fill in the ditches and put in a proper sidewalk and curb. But the cost is great, he said.
He, too, has been out to Hobin, even measuring motorists with his own personal speed gun, which earned him nasty looks.
“Speeding and traffic safety is the No. 1 issue in every community.”
Something is seriously messed up here. Hardly an engineer, but here’s what I call 10 cars ramming into the same brick wall on a slippery curve: a clue.
Try a stop sign, a speed bump — something — even as a pilot project, before more than bricks are broken where rubber leaves the road.