City Gives Haley, De La Vina New Speed Limits

As the article indicates, the police cannot do speed enforcement with radar unless the formal Engineering Traffic (speed) survey is current. Thus, the conundrum (as I called it in my remarks to the City Council Tuesday) results that in order for the police to enforce the speed limit the limit therefore has to be raised in compliance with the speed survey so radar can be an enforcement tool.

How much speed enforcement the police really will do now has become the dependent variable for whether speeds really will slow down on De la Vina Street downtown.

The data from the recent speed survey for De la Vina St. show that the 85th percentile speed already is close to 35 mph in the current zone posted at 25 mph, meaning that without this action to raise the speed limit to 30 mph then the vast majority of speeds still would be close to 35 mph UNLESS the police are doing more enforcement as an incentive for driving at the new speed limit of 30 mph.

Yep, this is quite a counter-intuitive conundrum. Besides overall not having enough police for speed enforcement, the root of the conundrum is an arcane State law that prohibits radar enforcement without a current speed survey.

The long-term solution, which the City Council approved, is to reclassify most of the residential streets as "local" streets with an automatic speed limit set at 25 mph, including De la Vina St. downtown. With that new classification enacted, then speed enforcement with police radar will become legal again, and to enforce at a speed limit of 25 mph in the truly residential streets, such as De la Vina Street is.

Until the City Council action yesterday, the police COULD NOT enforce with radar because the speed survey had expired. The new updated speed survey revealed that so many drivers were zipping at close to 35 mph that the speed limit had to be raised to allow legal enforcement with radar. The new limit is 30 mph because a plus or minus 5 mph deviation is allowed under the current law.

The new classification of all residential-like streets, to 25 mph possibly, is the mechanism that will allow the City police to enforce with radar. Two of us on the City Transportation Committee (appointed by City Council) will assist the City staff to Keep It Real on how the street classification is conducted objectively and expeditiously to follow the procedure specified by CalTrans so the streets can be reclassified to Local status instead of Collector or Arterial status.

I will write a lot more about this in a future Indy Blog posting and in a video production of "Off-Leash Public Affairs"
www.offleashpublicaffairs.org
early next year. My video will not be the City Administration-centered version of the story we all no doubt soon will be able to see in a City-produced episode of their video show "Inside Santa Barbara".

You pretty much regurgitate what the article says, good job! Time well spent!

This is good news. Back in the late 70s the City got in line with the rest of the world and converted downtown streets to these high-speed arterials to accommodate growth in the surrounding Riviera, San Roque, Samarkand and Mesa, Bel Aire and Veronica Springs neighborhoods.

It wasn't entirely illogical to change many of these streets to one-way arterials, some with bike lanes but the consequence was faster speeds. It would have been and still is appropriate to adopt a city wide speed limit of 30 or a better 25 mph speed limit.

There is this strange notion people develop that their newer neighborhood streets are to be "slow" speed while these mature streets are supposed to be accommodating "high-speed" collector and arterial thoroughfares. Really there is no difference or nothing more special in a San Roque residential street with speed humps than there is in a risky Downtown neighborhood street such as de la Vina, Chapala or even Haley except the downtown streets have more conflicts.

Come on folks slow down and pay attention!

A lower speed limit on Haley would help the hookers too :)

Can someone please explain the economic consequences of designating streets as "local"? I gather some federal funding will be lost but the article describes that amount is "negligible".

"Justice": the City does not yet have a figure on the loss of Federal funds if more streets are reclassified as Local instead of Connector or Arterial, the latter of which are what are eligible for the Federal funds.

Because the broad downtown area of Santa Barbara is mostly a grid of streets and most are now classified as Collector, drivers can choose any number of routes and thus the streets can seem like Collectors because most drivers may be passing through. That is good for traffic circulation because many options are available for a driving route (unlike the zone around upper State Street, for instance). This effect was described above by the "johnathansmith" comment. However, those same grid streets fully serve Local uses because they still are the only access routes. Hence, what the street reclassification study will be dealing with.

The "negligible" quote about loss of Federal funds is what City staff say, which is what CalTrans staff told our staff would be the financial difference. The Federal funds are based upon street distance and population, so the formula is not so obvious and I believe the actual amounts of Federal funds have been dwindling anyway as Federal priorities have been directed towards streets in Baghdad instead of streets in California.

I have requested that the City nail down that "negligible" funding figure early in this process, although the alternative to the loss of any Federal funds is more City spending anyway to conduct many more speed surveys, thereby negating the value of keeping those Federal funds, whatever they are.

As a policy approach for City governance, the City still first should figure out what street reclassification is possible and how speed limits accordingly can be reduced and still enforced with radar. Then, the Deciders can decide if that street reclassification (and possible reductions in speed limits) is worth the loss of whatever the Federal funds amount may be.

Thanks for the explanation, Dave - the article seemed a little cavalier in dismissing the decline in federal funding - the analysis you describe makes sense.

This is just another example of how supposedly wise people have screwed things up. Here we have a situation where the posted speed limit means nothing to most people, but law enforcement *cannot* do its job because somebody set the system up so they could not; not an act of God, not lack of technology, but because some group of people (no doubt at some boring planning meeting) made it that way.

I applaud efforts to actually enforce the law and stop this epidemic of aggressive, rude, and dangerous driving, but how pathetic that it will take all this time to do so.

By the way, there was a blogger a while ago in a similar blog who implied that I might be one of these slow drivers who holds up traffic, let me assure anyone who reads this that I go as close to the posted speed limit as I can, especially when there is traffic behind me. I simply don't see the need for me to break the law just because the person behind me (who can almost always pass me anyway if they are in such a hurry) didn't take the time to plan their day properly or they just simply are too frantic and self-absorbed to see the dangers of their actions.