'Consistency across the board' behind traffic calming policy

City engineer Chris Bosley told the Coeur d’Alene City Council Tuesday that the goal to reduce speeding on residential streets begins, first and foremost, with a plan.

“This is something we’ve been looking for for quite some time,” Bosley said, “just to have a formal policy to address complaints of speeding on any street, really. We really needed to have something in writing to show how we would do it and keep consistency across the board throughout the city.”

The official traffic calming policy, which was approved unanimously Tuesday night, was a year in the making. City staff originally worked to develop language through the Public Works Committee in 2019. After receiving committee feedback, Bosley tinkered with drafts of the policy until he found something acceptable to City Hall, one he believes will stop inefficiency in its tracks.

“The current process right now for addressing speeding complaints [is], we will get a call or an email saying that cars are speeding on a given street,” he explained. “I will talk to the homeowner or business owner to find out what their concerns are, to get more specifics about it. And then we’ll put speed counters out there.”

That data collection includes portable speed counters that inform drivers of their speeds versus the posted speed limit and clandestine speed counters called Armadillos that track speed while measuring traffic.

“Using that data, we can figure out if there’s any traffic calming measures that are warranted for that [area].”

While the gathering techniques work, the problem Bosley detailed was the manner in which complaints trigger data collection lacks uniformity. He said having an official plan would give officials a way to better organize where city resources can be directed.

“Once we get all these requests for traffic calming,” he explained, “we can prioritize them based on how severe the speeding is versus how much money we have available.”

That money equals approximately $40,000 through a line item in the Streets and Engineeering budget that allows for the procurement, maintenance, placement and data evaluation. The new policy, Bosley said, would likely not increase or decrease those funds at first.

“With this, we can play it year to year to see if it’s adequate,” he said.

The new policy also formalizes how neighborhood crash data is collected. City staff will work in concert with the Coeur d’Alene Police Department to show the most dangerous streets, data that will be thrown into the overall equation.

Councilmember Christie Wood — herself a retired police officer — championed Bosley’s efforts to include first responders into the process.

“I would like all city departments to recognize that you’re all experts in certain areas,” she said, “and you can glean a lot of information from one another, and not just data. So I appreciate that.”

Ultimately, Bosley said prioritizing traffic calming measures by data — rather than by individual complaints — will make a more efficient use of government resources by acting accordingly, rather than reacting.

“People tend to get upset if cars are going five miles per hour over the speed limit in their neighborhood,” Bosley observed, “and it makes sense you would be concerned about that. But it may be a very small number of cars doing that.”