Jennifer Smith

I'm not the only candidate who has been talking about speeding, road safety, and other local traffic issues lately.  Zeeshan Hamid over in Ward 8 has written some excellent posts on traffic and traffic calming measures, largely drawn from his experience living in various towns and cities in the U.S.

I thought I'd check to see what other mid-sized communities in Ontario are doing in this regard.  And lo and behold, I discovered this:

This publicly accessible document details a clearly defined procedure for quantifying traffic issues, identifying those areas that would benefit from traffic calming measures, establishing a hierarchy of measures that could be implemented, and scheduling follow-up studies to see if they're working.

Compare this to the Town of Milton's approach when residents of Woodward Ave. expressed concern about speeding on their street last year:

Traffic Calming

Presently, the Town of Milton doesn’t have a traffic calming policy in place or a traffic calming capital budget. Traffic calming fundamentally deals with the reduction of adverse impacts of motor vehicles on built-up areas. Primarily, it involves slowing the speed or reducing the volume of vehicular traffic on neighbourhood streets to increase safety and livability of a neighbourhood.

Traffic calming measures are usually applied on local residential roads. Traffic calming is not recommended for roads with a primary function of carrying high volume traffic such as arterial and collector roads. As Woodward Avenue is classified as a collector road, it would not warrant traffic calming.

There are several things I find curious about this report when comparing it to the policies in Caledon - besides the fact that we don't have a policy.  One is the statement that traffic calming measures are not recommended for collector roads such as Woodward, Commercial, Scott, etc.  Really? According to who? Because the Town(ship) of Caledon seems to feel that collector roads are perfect places for traffic calming as long as they are appropriate to traffic volume.

Another curiosity is the difference in the warrants when it comes to speeding.  These are generally based on speed studies which determine both the average speed and the 85th percentile speed (i.e. the speed which 85% of the vehicles travel below).

Although Milton's warrants don't seem to be publicly available anywhere that I have been able to find, whatever they are, no street ever seems to qualify.  For example, the 85th percentile speed for some sections of Woodward was 63 kph, which is 13 kph above the speed limit.  Similar results were found for north Commercial Street when they did a study here, even though the posted limit was 40 kph.  And yet in both cases, these results were deemed "acceptable".

In Caledon, an "acceptable" 85% speed is defined as 10 kph over the posted limit. Anything above that warrants an investigation into traffic calming measures.

Warrants are important for making consistent and unbiased decisions regarding speed limits, stop signs, crosswalks, etc.  But it is equally important that the warrants themselves be reasonable, accessible to the public, and integrated into a coherent traffic management and traffic calming policy.  Such a policy would not only give the public a better understanding of the reasoning behind these decisions, but would provide them with a specific process to bring their concerns forward without having to find a motivated advocate on council.

Most importantly, a traffic calming policy like the one in Caledon would actually solve problems instead of just identifying them by giving our town staff a hierarchy of real, effective options for traffic calming - besides just saying no to unnecessary 4-way stop signs.