I sit on Royal Oak’s Traffic and Safety Committee. The most common issue that comes before our committee is speeding on residential streets. Child and pedestrian safety drive the issue, but so does noise. Residents often ask for additional stop signs, the committee lets them know about their ineffectiveness and that we have no other options for them. Occasionally we will recommend increased enforcement, but realistically the Royal Oak police are overburdened with these requests already.

While Royal Oak doesn’t have a solution today, Ann Arbor does. They have developed a traffic calming program where residents can petition for changes that slow down vehicles in their neighborhood.  From my perspective, it’s a very realistic approach to addressing residents’ concerns.

Of course it’s relatively easy for a local governments to commit to supporting something like this. It’s quite another for them to commit to funding it. Based on their completed projects list, it appears Ann Arbor has stepped up.

Tags: Ann Arbor, Royal Oak, traffic calming

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Quality of Life, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.