More residents may be able to weigh in on Belmont’s traffic calming program, as the city is hoping to boost participation and update eligibility for neighborhood roads that face dangerous cut-through or high-speed traffic.
The program, more than 20 years old, made some changes to include the Parking and Traffic Safety Committee — comprising employees from the Public Works, Police and Fire departments — as well as eligibility updates for potential projects. Currently, residents can file city requests to implement measures that will help mitigate speeding and traffic concerns in their neighborhood. The effort is focused on local roads and often includes installations such as speed cushions or visual markers that increase drivers’ overall road awareness.
More recent program updates would change criteria so certain roads could qualify for the program if the critical speed — or the speed that 15% of drivers exceed — is at least 7 miles over the speed limit on a local road and if average daily traffic is above 1,000 vehicles daily. For collector streets, slightly more trafficked than local roads, daily traffic would have to exceed 3,000 vehicles on average.
The issue is more salient in recent years, as regional and citywide traffic continuously increases, thereby creating more cut-through traffic and affecting the overall safety of local residents in those streets.
“Traffic calming is meant to address neighborhood-impacted traffic management issues. We have multiple transportation planning documents that govern how we do transportation,” City Manager Afshin Oskoui said. “[This] is meant to address small, neighborhood-related issues.”
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Some, including resident Giuliano Carlini, raised questions over the impact on cyclists.
“The current process provides almost no way for a cyclist to give input on suggested changes because they might not be suitable for traffic calming,” Carlini said during public comment. “But there is no way to meaningfully give input.”
The traffic calming plan is just one part of a larger effort that addresses multimodal transportation improvements, Oskoui said. And there are also certain misconceptions over what the city is able to implement under state law, such as stop signs or speed bumps on certain roads, which the additional planned education initiatives are meant to address.
Once residents submit requests, the process can still take up to a few years to complete, depending on the severity. The city will survey the area for about three to six months, determining if it warrants calming measures, said Assistant Public Works Director Tracy Scramaglia. And before implementation, affected neighborhood residents would have to approve the changes before a trial period becomes permanent.
“It can take up to two years from the time of the application, and that’s because any time you’re making any engineering change we want to make sure that we are making it safer and not more dangerous,” Scramaglia said.
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