The City of Castlegar may try out a lower speed limit on 5th Avenue South, as council considers reducing speeds in residential areas throughout the city.
City council received a letter this month on behalf of multiple residents on 5th, a major residential thoroughfare through Kinnaird. The letter said speeding has been an ongoing issue and asked the city to consider lowering the limit, to install traffic-calming measures like speed bumps, raised crosswalks, or curb extensions, and to provide more signage or electric speed readers to encourage people to slow down.
Councillor Sue Heaton-Sherstobitoff put forward a motion that the city place speed readers as requested and ask RCMP to do some extra enforcement.
Councillor Darcy Bell, who lives on 5th, said he could personally attest that “it gets really bad there. The speed they drive is crazy. So I support anything we do to help reduce that.” Councillor Brian Bogle agreed something needs to be done, because he often sees pedestrians walking along that street, which has no sidewalks.
Mayor Maria McFaddin proposed a pilot project to see if lowering the limit from 50 km/h to 40 km/h would make a difference. She suggested that in a 50 zone, drivers might be willing to go as high as 60, but in a 40 zone, they might at least slow down to 50.
She said lowering the limit on every residential street in the city would “open a can of worms,” so she would prefer to keep experiment to one area. She also noted that the city’s electronic signs are out of commission due to vandalism.
Heaton-Sherstobitoff said council has already had discussed changing speed limits, and the advice they received from engineering staff was that things can get confusing when there are different limits on different streets.
She suggested some electronic speed signs be rented until the city’s are fixed. She also suggested there are streets that have even worse problems than 5th Avenue, citing 6th and 9th examples.
“There’s complaints all the time on 9th, so I think we do simple things right now and then just pass it over to staff to see what their recommendations are,” she said.
City staff said one of the broken sign boards is expected to be repaired, while another will have to be replaced, but it’s not known how long that will take.
Heaton-Sherstobitoff’s original motion carried. McFaddin then put forward the idea of asking city staff to provide a report on reducing the speed limit on 5th, and using the results to help determine whether to make a similar change city-wide, except for the main corridors. That motion also passed.
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