A government group in DuPage County has some words of caution for communities considering speed bumps or traffic circles to pacify residents who complain about cars speeding or taking shortcuts through their neighborhoods.
They are advising towns to slow down, do some research and look first at other options.
Traffic calming measures are not always the best approach, said a report released Wednesday by the Oak Brook-based DuPage Mayors and Managers Conference. Putting police officers on the street is the most-effective tool for enforcing traffic regulations, the report said.
“Traffic calming works very well in some cases, but it doesn’t work in all cases,” said Bob Dean, transportation planning liaison for the conference, a 35-member council of suburbs that are entirely or partly in DuPage.
Instead, the conference recommends that towns do traffic studies and educate residents about the problems and possible solutions. People often think traffic situations are worse than they are, Dean said.
In a new pamphlet, the conference advises: “Before jumping on the traffic calming bandwagon, we encourage communities to think carefully about the effects of installing traffic calming measures, and to try other means of reducing speeds, such as education and enforcement, that are less expensive and less permanent than physical traffic calming measures.”
With increases in traffic during the last 10 years–and complaints about traffic–communities throughout the Chicago area have embraced a variety of measures to reduce speed, improve safety and discourage motorists from using residential streets as shortcuts. Some suburbs use speed humps; others are testing roundabouts, which force motorists to drive around an island in an intersection. Stop signs also are a common response to neighborhood concerns.
After doing traffic studies in the late 1990s, Oak Park opted to employ several traffic calming measures. Among the latest are pole-mounted signs on the east side of Oak Park with built-in radar detectors that display a car’s speed and flash when a motorist is driving faster than the posted limit, said Michael Koperniak, a village engineer.
Oak Park also narrowed the lanes on busy Chicago Avenue by marking parking lanes on both sides of the street. Signs warn that motorists are prohibited from driving in the parking lanes. The result was a 2- to 3-m.p.h. drop in average speeds, Koperniak said.
“Reducing lane width has a tendency to slow down drivers,” he said.
As to the overall impact of the program, he said: “Speeds are lower in places. Crashes are going down, and we don’t seem to have as many requests for stop signs as we used to.”
Some communities have soured on traffic calming measures and removed them after complaints from residents and emergency personnel or problems with maintenance.
The report, compiled for the conference by Coulter Transportation Consulting Inc., also said there have been few before-and-after studies in the Chicago area on the effectiveness of such measures.
Dean said the conference is considering a joint effort with the Northwest Municipal Conference in northwest Cook County to set up an Internet-based clearinghouse for information.
