Traffic Calming

[bcwessel]

Traffic Calming
Speed Bumps, Extended Curbs, Lane Reductions, Sidewalks & Other Traffic Calming Devices

For news on traffic-calming initiatives regionwide, as well as general discussion
about traffic-calming strategies and other streets due for this treatment

815

[bcwessel]

Four Kitchener streets eyed for traffic calming
Terry Pender | The Record | 27 January 2012 | LINK (http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/662114--four-kitchener-streets-eyed-for-traffic-calming)

This year four streets will be studied for possible traffic-calming measures, which is double the previous number completed each year since the program started in 2004.

The numbers collected by the City of Kitchener indicate a love-hate relationship with vehicles. Most people drive one, but a growing list wants fewer cars in their neighbourhoods.

In the past seven years the road network expanded by 14 per cent and fully 42 per cent of the urban area is paved over. At the same time the list of streets where residents want traffic calming has grown to 151 streets.

Traffic calming works, said John McBride, the city’s director of transportation planning, and that increases the demand for it.

“Where we have implemented it there has been a positive result as far as a reduction in speed, volumes and collisions and they have been overwhelmingly supported by the neighbourhood,” McBride said.

Traffic calming involves physical changes to the roadway that force drivers to slow down and discourage other drivers from using the street. Speed humps, speed bumps, extending the curb, removing parking spaces, eliminating a lane, extending curbs into the roadway to stop vehicles from turning into a street and sometimes dead-ending a street, are all used.

It will cost about $200,000 to review the streets this year and then makes changes the roadways.

This year Glasgow Street (between Fischer Hallman Road and Belmont Avenue), Morrison Road (between King Street East and Sims Estate Drive), the neighbourhood bounded by Traynor Avenue, Connaught Avenue, Wilson Avenue and Franklin Street), and Guelph Street (between Weber and Lancaster) will be studied by traffic technicians this year.