Bumpy road ahead: Asheville resuming traffic calming

About once a month, a speeding or distracted driver leaves a present in West Asheville resident Elaine Poovey's front yard: A side mirror knocked off when their vehicle gets too close to a telephone pole at the edge of the street in front of her home.

A recent city decision to resume funding for traffic calming measures like speed humps on residential streets is designed to make it easier for people like Poovey to keep their yards tidy.

After suspending traffic calming efforts for nearly seven years, the city will spend as much as $100,000 this summer on new projects to put speed humps and similar "speed cushions" on residential streets where speeding is a problem.

Officials plan to devote the same amount to traffic calming each of the next four fiscal years. The new funding will come out of proceeds from a tax increase City Council approved last year.

Partly to make the money go further, City Council adopted changes to the city traffic calming policy recently that limit the types of structures to be installed on streets. The policy also calls for other efforts to deal with speeding first before deciding whether workers should install speed humps, those broad, low mounds of asphalt that can be comfortably traversed at 25 mph.

The city has not spent any money on traffic calming since the 2006-07 fiscal year because of a shortage of funding, said Ken Putnam, Asheville's interim public works director.

Officials in many other cities around the country tell a similar story, said Steven Brown, a traffic engineer based in Anaheim, Calif. Brown has written books on traffic calming practices.

"Philosophically, cities are still interested in it but the Great Recession limited" funding, said Brown, a principal at traffic consulting firm Fehr & Peers. "It tended not to be the highest priority."

Impediment or life saver?

Nationwide, traffic calming structures can include an array of raised crosswalks, traffic islands, narrowing streets, pavement markings and other devices.

Asheville's new policy limits new structures to speed humps and speed cushions. The cushions have gaps at ground level that are spaced so fire trucks, with their wide wheel bases, can straddle the devices without slowing down while drivers of normal, narrower vehicles have to hit the brakes.

City government drew lots of criticism in 2008 for a traffic calming project on Kimberly Avenue and other streets in the upscale Grove Park neighborhood in North Asheville. Grove Park Inn funded the project as a condition of city approval of an expansion of the inn that was expected to draw more traffic to the area.

Drivers ran into islands placed in the center of some streets or bulbouts beside travel lanes and there were reports of damage to vehicles. Some people complained that the concrete structures were unsightly.

But several neighborhood residents said the measures were effective in slowing traffic through residential areas — and some suggested that drivers who ran into the structures should just ease up on the gas pedal the next time they drove through.

The issue surfaced again in last year's mayoral race. Candidate John Miall, who went on to lose to Mayor Esther Manheimer by a wide margin, said at a September campaign forum that the "concrete globs" should be removed.

"The purpose of a paved road is to express traffic. Anything else we do to inhibit that creates a problem," Miall said.

Critics of traffic calming measures nationally say they waste drivers' time and either shift traffic to parallel streets or already-busy arterial roads.

Backers say streets should also be safe for pedestrians, bicycle riders and other drivers and that speeders even threaten people who are on their own property minding their own business.

Putnam says speeding is among the leading subjects of complaints his office receives. Poovey, who sits on the city's Neighborhood Advisory Council, said that body frequently hears the same concerns.

West Asheville neighborhood activist Rich Lee said someone veered off Riverview Drive there a few years ago and ran into the front porch of a home.

Earlier this year, a minivan crashed into a construction dumpster in front of a home under renovation on Riverview. That pushed the dumpster into a man who was on the opposite side of the dumpster, breaking both of his legs.

Riverview runs south between Haywood Road and Amboy Road along the crest of the slope that rises from the western bank of the French Broad River.

"It's a cut-through street," Lee said. "You have a good mix of people that live on the road and people who are coming up from the river and going somewhere else."

The speed limit on Riverview is 25 mph. Lee said city workers doing two traffic studies on the street in recent months clocked at least one vehicle going 70 mph each day they were there.

Riverview leads to French Broad River Park where Amboy crosses the French Broad, but it has no sidewalks and Lee says that traffic means that even though many residents live only a short distance from the park it is not safe for them to make the trip on foot.

Police efforts have not solved the problem, he said.

"They have been good about coming out to an intersection ... but they've got so much area to cover, they really can't sit on any one road 24 hours a day," Lee said.

Poovey sees similar problems on the section of Bear Creek Road that runs in front of her home a little south of Patton Avenue in West Asheville's Malvern Hills neighborhood. A sidewalk on the street gets lots of use, she said, but speeding and accidents mean many residents are uncomfortable in their front yards.

Once, Poovey heard "a teriffic crash bang" and saw that a car had jumped the curb, hit the telephone pole in front of her home and ended up in her yard. At least a couple of accidents have spilled over into yards or driveways a few feet up the street on the opposite side, she said.

Police have done what they can and the city lowered the speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph but problems persist, she said. A city study found that more than 90 percent of cars clocked over a five-year period were speeding, Poovey said.

"The police have been very, very responsive," she said, but there are no places for them to park out of sight when they are trying to catch speeders. When police are present, drivers moderate their speed, but when police leave, drivers go back to old habits.

Police "just can't sit here all the time," Poovey said.

Cars vs. people

Brown said a majority of cities in the West and Northeast have policies to install traffic calming measures. They are part of a larger trend toward efforts to make streets and highways friendlier for people on foot, on a bike or on a bus, he said.

"The movement across the country has been away from moving cars to moving people," he said.

Some of the resistance to traffic calming comes from emergency workers concerned about the increased time it takes to respond to a fire or medical emergency on a street with traffic calming structures in place.

Putnam said studies show one speed hump can delay an ambulance as much as 10 seconds.

Brown said it is clear that traffic calming encourages more people to walk or ride a bicycle and reduces the number and severity of traffic accidents.

There has been no comprehensive study weighing the health benefits of those trends versus the negative impacts on health that come from slowing down ambulances and fire trucks, he said, but it seems reasonable to think that the plus side outweighs the downside.

"The delay is only minimal. ... What's the comparison between that and fewer collisions, better health from walking?"

A change in the Asheville traffic calming policy city council adopted March 25 is intended to strike what Putnam hopes is the proper balance. It prohibits installation of traffic calming devices on streets where city fire department response times do not meet its standard at least 90 percent of the time and allows speed cushions in some cases to ease fire trucks' way.

The street where you live

The city has a petition process by which neighborhoods have requested traffic calming, but some projects that the city has deemed as needed have gone years without funding.

People in Poovey's neighborhood have been working 11 years to have structures installed to slow traffic on Bear Creek Road, she said, and each household agreed to chip in $100 each.

Poovey politely scolded City Council on that point during a council community meeting in West Asheville in January 2013, saying, "I sense a disconnect when City Council says they support traffic calming but then do not fund traffic calming."

The city plans to grant Poovey's wish this summer, and also will install traffic calming on Riverview Drive, the target of Lee's efforts. A handful of other streets where the need for the measures is clear will also see traffic calming this year, Putnam said.

Residents along streets not on the city's backlog list will have to go through a process in which the city first tries giving neighbors pamphlets, pledge cards, window stickers and signs to raise community awareness of speeding issues over at least a six-month period.

While neighborhood residents concerned about traffic issues often complain about cut-through traffic, Putnam and others say many speeders live just down the street.

If the neighborhood awareness campaign doesn't work, at least 60 percent of property owners along a street would have to sign a petition and the city would have to document the need for speed humps or cushions.

"We don't want to go out and spend the money if the people don't want it," Putnam said.

Poovey does.

Getting speed humps on Bear Creek Road will let residents "reclaim our neighborhood in terms of being able to use all parts of it in a safe manner," she said.