Abstract Manager

In communities large and small, requests for traffic calming remain one of the most common reasons for residents to contact their municipal governments. And while the impacts of vehicle speed on the safety of the most vulnerable road users – especially seniors, children and people with disabilities – are well documented and understood, traditional approaches to traffic calming still rely on a reactive, cumbersome process. Speed and volume studies, traffic calming warrants, neighbourhood petitions and municipal council approval are frequently required to implement traffic calming measures to balance the movement function of a street against the quality of life for the residents who live there. The result is a process that is reactive by design – responding to concerns after a street has been built and after driver behaviour has already created the conditions where residents feel unsafe on their street.

In addition to being a slow, expensive process, the current reactive approach to Traffic Calming is also fundamentally inequitable. Well-resourced communities can make their voices heard, gather signatures on a petition and navigate the bureaucratic process more easily than communities with a high proportion of renters, single parents or residents for whom English is a second language. To make matters worse, these communities are often the ones where levels of injury are highest to begin with, and where Traffic Calming would bring the most benefit in terms of expanding access and safety for these communities.

In this session, practitioners will be introduced to a new approach to Traffic Calming – one that shifts towards a proactive, equity-focused model of implementing traffic calming. Rather than implementing measures according to which neighbourhood speaks loudest, this approach focuses on proactive outreach to all members of the community to identify areas of concern. The community feedback is then validated by quantitative analysis, which helps to inform the prioritization of measures based both on the level of need and the resources necessary to implement them. This new approach helps to make the installation of Traffic Calming measures more transparent, reduces the burden on staff to validate and respond to individual traffic calming requests and produces trust within the community, since high-priority measures can be identified and implemented quickly, demonstrating a community’s desire to listen to the concerns of its residents and respond accordingly.