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Redwood City is taking its traffic calming initiative to the streets to create a safer and more pedestrian-friendly environment.
Currently, Roosevelt Avenue is the focus of this effort, with the City planning further outreach and design phases.
Redwood City’s traffic calming strategy, which includes temporary measures like speed bumps and curb extensions, is designed to reduce speeding and enhance safety on residential streets. This approach involves testing and adjusting solutions based on community feedback before finalizing them.
According to the Institute of Transportation Engineers, traffic calming consists of physical interventions that slow down traffic, enhance safety, and improve residents’ quality of life.
According to Malahat Owrang, a senior transportation planner with Redwood City, the strategy is more appropriate and used for neighborhood streets that have lower vehicle traffic volume and suffer from speeding and inappropriate driving behavior.
The City starts traffic calming efforts based on requests from neighborhood residents or petitions. After getting the form, city staff checks the traffic in the area to see if it qualifies for traffic calming. They look at things like past accidents, nearby places that bring in a lot of people, the number of cars using the road each day, and how fast the cars are going.
Owrang said the City engages with people living on both sides of the street through mail, neighborhood meetings and sometimes walk audits or visits. Officials gather feedback through emails during the planning and design phase.
The City first tests out temporary traffic calming measures, like speed bumps or curb extensions, before making them permanent. This is known as the quick-build approach. It observes how well the changes are working and gathers feedback from the community before investing in the more expensive changes. This way, adjustments can be made during this testing phase to better fit the needs of residents if needed.
If adjustments are needed, they can be made during this testing phase to better suit residents’ needs. Based on feedback, the city makes small changes to the quick-build project, but bigger changes that require more funding are included in the permanent project.
“We try to address residents’ concerns as much as possible, especially when a project
transitions to permanent.” Owrang said. “However, we receive a wide range of ideas and feedback, and it is not possible to meet and satisfy all the expectations.”
The City chooses traffic calming measures based on the type of road and the specific issues in each area. Some common measures include speed humps, curb extensions that slow down turning vehicles, making crosswalks shorter and narrowing the road to encourage slower driving, and traffic circles helping control speed on residential streets by requiring vehicles to yield as they go around the circle.
But, securing funding is a major challenge associated with expanding traffic calming to more areas. According to the City, it may sometimes take a few years to fully fund a project. Due to the City’s limited budget, staff often rely on local, regional, or federal grants.
Residents in the Roosevelt area petitioned for traffic calming solutions due to concerns about speeding. The City’s inspection found that Roosevelt Avenue’s average speed, collision history, and the presence of key pedestrian hubs like Red Morton Park and Roosevelt Elementary School made it an ideal candidate for traffic calming measures.
The planning phase started in 2019, but COVID impacted the execution. The City received $750,000 for the quick-build and $3.4 million for the permanent project, both as federal grants from the Department of Transportation.
According to Owrang, neighborhood residents were involved in the planning and conceptual design phase. Roosevelt Avenue is the only active traffic calming project in Redwood that was initiated by neighborhood residents.
After completing the quick build/pilot phase, city officials are starting the outreach and design phase for the permanent project this fall.
Besides calming down traffic, the city is undertaking other initiatives to ensure road safety, such as reducing the speed limit near schools to 15 mph in some areas and building a bike boulevard on Vera Avenue in downtown Redwood City.
“All that said, capital improvements on their own cannot address traffic safety. Driving behavior and public education about safe driving is very important,” Owrang added.
Who were the residents involved with the ideas of Roosevelt calming project & what year?? The loss of right turn off Roosevelt onto Upton @ Key Mkt is making more congestion of traffic flow to Roosevelt School!
My comment isn’t going thru cuz it said I already said it! NO!!