Drivers, prepare to press on the brakes when cruising around St. Albert neighbourhoods next week.
The city will begin its rollout of traffic-speed changes on May 11 to increase safety and reduce severe collisions on local roadways. Those changes, which include bringing down residential road speeds to 40 km/h, some arterial roads to 60 km/h, and making school-zone start times earlier, were approved by council in February.
Changes won't take effect all at once, said Dean Schick, the city's transportation manager. Extensions to playground-zone times will be done first, then neighbourhoods will be converted as a whole, with increases to arterial-road speeds, school-zone time changes, and pedestrian-crossing improvements to come in later phases. The traffic-calming rollout is set to be complete by the end of August.
Schick said the neighbourhood-specific speed changes are set to start around May 18.
"That will be the first quadrant, the southeast quadrant, where we're starting in the community of Akinsdale," he said, adding the city will be working in a "clockwise fashion" from the southeast to the southwest and northwest, ending in the northeast with Erin Ridge and Erin Ridge North, where neighbourhood speeds were already reduced two years ago.
Visit this page to explore details on the project and the implementation plan, along with a list and a map where residents can follow along as city staff work on the changes.
Signs reminding drivers of the speed changes will be posted at entrances to city neighbourhoods at least 24 hours before crews start working in each area, with the city favouring more visible educational signage over delivering paper notices to each residence, Schick said.
The new speeds will officially take effect once the actual speed-limit signs are posted.
"We've tried very, very hard to make sure that there's very transparent and a large amount of opportunity of information sharing in regard to these changes in the project delivery," Schick said.
The whole project will cost about $230,000 from the city's traffic safety reserve. New speed-limit signs are expected to cost $60,000, and playground-zone sign changes will cost $5,000. Improvements for pedestrian-crossing improvements, such as overhead-crossing flashers on Dawson Road, will cost $150,000. About $15,000 will be spent on educating the public on the changes.
The city did capture about $2,500 in savings by putting decals on school-zone sign changes instead of ordering new signs, Schick said.
The most contention city staffers have encountered from the public over the changes is around survey results released by administration in January.
Some residents have taken issue with the fact the city went ahead with changes despite 57 per cent of the 2,952 who responded to that specific question in the online survey, noting they were against reducing speeds. A total of 3,016 respondents did the online survey.
Survey comments appeared to refute that, however, as Schick said 20 per cent of those respondents noted they were OK with speed reductions on neighbourhood roads, just not collector roadways.
City administration looked at keeping collector roads at 50 km/h, which would mean bombarding the community with signage, Schick said. Frequent speed changes could also cause confusion for drivers.
"If we take into account the 20 per cent that actually support the local road versus the collector … there is actually greater support for reduced neighbourhood speeds in the city," he said.
The margin of error for the residential road speed portion of the city's online survey is two per cent, according to Politikos Research, the company hired by the city to conduct the survey.
