Another blog post about the City’s traffic calming program
In January, the City announced updates to its traffic calming program: now you can request traffic calming near where you live, a computer program determines whether that location is eligible, and then if you’re approved you get to try to collect signatures from 60% of the households on your block before the city will do anything. I did a blog post about the petition requirement because someone from the City posted a tweet saying the petition requirement was removed, then they backtracked on that. The requirement that you have to circulate a petition rather than the City just automatically putting in safety infrastructure is ridiculous. But it turns out I don’t need to worry about that because my block isn’t even eligible.
I submitted a traffic calming request for my block, and it was denied. The message I received from 311 stated: “The Streets Department reported that a traffic study was completed and it was determined that the request is not warranted.” That’s wild, given that any time I sit on my porch for a few minutes, I’ll see car after car blow through the stop signs at the corner.
I was skeptical that the City actually did a traffic study. So I submitted a Right-to-Know Law request for that too. Here are the results of the “study”:
thorough!
I wanted to know more about this bizarre system! I had previously requested the scoring criteria/rubric the City uses for evaluating traffic calming requests, and received a copy of a technical memo from Kittelson & Associates. I submitted new RTKL requests for 1) Kittelson’s invoices to the City, and 2) Kittelson’s emails/attachments to e-mails with the City.
Kittelson spent about a year evaluating the City’s traffic calming and safety study program. They have a contract with the City for “on call planning services” and the City gave them a $145k work order for this.
The most interesting document I got was a copy of Kittelson’s notes following a 12/5/23 public hearing before the Committee of Streets and Services. Councilmember Cindy Bass grilled the Streets Department about the new traffic calming program, and here’s Kittelson’s summary of how they responded.
I think the Streets Department failed pretty hard at making this process easy or transparent. I just want the City to do something about cars speeding down my block and blowing through stop signs. I followed their procedure, and I was told my block is ineligible because of a “study” done back in 2022. The results of that study actually concluded there was frequent speeding on my block, but apparently not far enough over the speed limit to warrant any changes. This traffic study also failed to look at whether people stop at stop signs or the speed at which they pass through. I’ll probably do another request to find out more about what goes into a traffic study.
Here are the meeting notes in full:
I simply do not have the technical understanding to interpret this design documentation prepared by JMT.
Here’s the supporting documentation for how our taxpayer dollars were spent: