A municipality’s guide

One of the fundamental steps in designing a traffic calming program is to ensure that solutions are installed where they are most needed and can be most effective in improving neighborhood safety. With cities receiving so many requests, it can be hard to determine which neighborhood the city should work with first. One solution that many municipalities use is a point system to determine where products are most needed.

Point systems have proven invaluable to many successful traffic calming programs including those in Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Salt Lake City, Utah. The first step in employing a point system is to conduct a traffic study to determine which streets have the highest traffic volume, speed, and safety concerns.

Once streets are identified, the point system involves ranking each of the streets with a point value based on local priorities. Examples of the types of information that are ranked include whether the street generates pedestrian traffic; proximity to a school, park, Church, or store; presence of a bike lane or bus lane; number of miles that the 85th%tile speed exceeds the posted speed limits; and volume of traffic.

By assigning different point values to specific indicators, community officials can clearly assess and rank a street’s need for calming solutions based on distinct number values. Streets with the highest scores are identified as program priorities. This allows cities to focus on those streets with the greatest safety needs.

Once the highest ranking streets are chosen, there are two options a traffic calming program can choose. The first is to advance directly to installing permanent products based on information from the ranking system. The second is to test temporary solutions to assess their effectiveness and which products are most appropriate for the targeted streets.

The advantage of Traffic Logix rubber traffic calming products is that they can be used as either permanent or temporary solutions. Even when used as permanent solutions, the products can be easily removed if the city decides to move the traffic calming device for construction or even relocate the device. When used for temporary solutions, the Traffic Logix devices can be kept as permanent if they are determined to be effective and appropriate for the tested street. In addition, since Traffic Logix products are modular, a city can use the same central pieces with different configurations to test different products, interchanging the speed humps, speed tables, speed cushions, etc.

Without utilizing a point system, it can be difficult for a city to determine which streets to target. Attention can be mistakenly focused on the streets with the most vocal residents rather than those with the most crucial safety concerns. While each city has to determine its own point system based on local needs, using this structure allows cities to identify and address neighborhood streets that have the most crucial need for traffic calming.