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On a Friday in mid-November, nearly two months after construction on her street had been completed, longtime Redwood City resident Betty Matsumoto-Schuch woke up to the sound of jackhammers.
Looking out the window from her house on Hudson Street, she couldn’t believe her eyes: Workers were in the street scraping off large portions of the newly installed speed humps.
“Literally, they had started at the 100 block, and they were tearing out the center hump,” Matsumoto-Schuch said.
The additional work on the speed hump project, which was originally approved in June to install traffic calming measures along five streets west of El Camino Real, would ultimately cost the city $120,900, on top of the already approved $550,500 for the project.
As Matsumoto-Schuch and her husband would find out, a design flaw in the construction of the original speed humps had forced the city to have them rebuilt.
The issue was a lack of detail in the city’s original plans, which led to a misinterpretation of how the speed humps should be designed, according to Transportation Manager and Acting City Engineer Jessica Manzi.
The design of the speed humps includes precisely placed slots that are meant to enable emergency vehicles to clear the humps while still slowing residential traffic. However, two dozen speed humps had already been installed along Hudson, Canyon and Edgewood when the city was notified that the design didn’t allow firetrucks to pass through without significantly slowing down.
“The detail in the plans did not clearly define how the interior sides of the speed humps would be built…so what ended up built was too steep to accommodate our fire equipment wheels,” she said. “It’s a bit of an art trying to get the design exactly right.”
The city originally signed a contract to pay R & M Paving Contractors $550,500, and up to 10% more, to install the speed humps along the residential streets of Hudson, Hazel, Oak, Canyon and Edgewood.
The first round of installations was completed in late September, at which point Manzi and the transportation department’s engineering team were aware of the issue. Because additional costs exceeded what was budgeted for in the original contract, the department had to seek approval from the city council to increase the amount by $105,983 for a total contract amount of up to $689,307. Manzi attributed delays in construction to this process.
The request was approved in mid-November, and the final speed humps were completed on Nov. 29.
For Matsumoto-Schuch and her neighbors, it wasn’t so much the fact of the additional construction that bothered them as the lack of notification from the city.
“We are all for making sure our first responders can get from A to B as efficiently as possible,” she said. “The biggest issue for us was nobody bothered to even inform the residents what was happening…No explanation. No notification. That was the frustrating part. Nobody knew why they were doing it.”
An initial notification was sent out to residents at the start of the construction, but Manzi said additional updates aren’t usually issued throughout the process.
“We have project webpages, and that’s typically the mechanism we use for communication updates over the course of construction,” she said.
Matsumoto-Schuch and her husband, who have lived in their house for 30 years, began advocating for traffic calming measures in early 2021 after noticing cars driving 45-50 miles per hour down the street.
Despite the delays and additional construction, she said they were relieved to see the city taking action finally—and cars slowing down.
“We're just happy to have speed humps in there because it does help to mitigate the problem that existed for way too long,” she said.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the location of the speed humps. Speed bumps were added along five streets west of El Camino Real. To request a correction, contact editor@rwcpulse.com.
