Jennifer Smith

Thanks in large part to certain candidates making this an election issue, staff have proposed a draft Traffic Calming Policy which will be debated and voted on at this evening's Community Services Standing Committee meeting. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend - at least not for most of it - but I'm hoping there will be enough councillors and community members there with an interest in traffic calming to make sure this is done right.

In general, I like what I'm seeing. It's fairly similar to Caledon's policy, which I discussed in an earlier blog post. There are specific procedures for requesting traffic calming measures and for determining which solutions would be most appropriate. There is also a requirement that residents of the affected street sign off on the measures, which is very important in terms of assuring public support. And there is a large arsenal of remedies, with the pros and cons considered for each.

There is one notable difference between our proposed policy and that of Caledon, and that is the minimum requirements for a street to be considered enough of a problem to warrant action.

Our policy uses the same '85th percentile' standard that staff have used in speeding studies all along, which draws the line at 85% of cars traveling no more than 15 kph above the speed limit. In other words, if 15% of cars are traveling above 65 kph in a 50 kph zone, you are deemed to have a speeding problem. Anything less is considered acceptable, regardless of what kind of street it is.

The problem here is, speed limits are a function of law enforcement, not engineering. Except for school zones and some arterial roads, just about every street in town has the same speed limit, but that doesn't mean that's necessarily a safe speed to drive at.

For example, if you drive 50 kph along Ontario Street South, you're likely to get honked at. If you try to take Charles Street at 50 kph, you probably won't make the curve. But according to this, having a significant number of drivers going 60 or even 64 kph along small narrow side streets would not be considered a problem.

I've sent an email to a few councillors with an interest in this strongly suggesting that either the bar be lowered to 10 kph above the limit, or (even better) that the speeding standard be scaled based on the type of street. Although there are other considerations taken into account with this policy's points system (pedestrian traffic, accident frequency, etc.), with the 85th percentile standard set at 15 kph, you are pretty much guaranteeing that no street in Milton will ever qualify for traffic calming.

What concerns me is that this may have been the intent.

The points system, although great in principle, sets the bar extremely high - so high, in fact, that I don't think it would even be physically possible for a street to approach the maximums on some of these. For example, in order for a collector road like Commercial or Laurier to get the maximum 20 points for traffic volume, it would have to have about the same volume as Ontario Street.




Here's one case in point: Scott Boulevard is a collector road that has known issues with speeding and accidents in the south end, and is considered by most to be a perfect candidate for traffic calming. Let's see if it would qualify, shall we? Working up from the bottom:

• Pedestrian generators: One school + one park = 10 points
• Sidewalks: Present = 0 points (pretty much every street in Milton has at least one sidewalk)
• Collisions: Not sure if they're counting collisions with small children like the one last year, but let's say it has 4 collisions per year = 2 points (that's a lot)
• Short-cutting: It's a collector road with nothing at the bottom, so 0 points
• Volume: Pretty light, but let's be generous and say 4,000 ADT (Average Daily Traffic) = 10 points (that's quite busy)

That's 22 points. In order to qualify for traffic calming a collector road needs 52 points, which means that the only other qualifier - 85th percentile speeding - would have to be 77 kph outside of the school zone. I don't know if you've ever read a speeding study, but that simply doesn't happen.

Don't get me wrong - I love that we're getting a traffic calming policy, and I love that they are setting specific minimum qualifications to focus on streets with real, rather than perceived, problems. But those qualifications need to be more realistic - otherwise, this is just a placebo.