The Park Ridge City Council held a broad discussion on traffic safety at its Sept. 8 Committee of the Whole meeting.
While the city council held no vote and is unlikely to address any specific streets anytime soon, the discussion was intended to offer clarity to residents who often complain that certain streets are dangerous due to speeding and negligent driving.
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However, the discussion made clear that complaints alone couldn’t change much and even a few speeding, reckless drivers do not warrant so-called “traffic calming devices.” Those strategies could include bump outs and speed bumps as well as more narrow streets, which naturally demand drivers’ attention.
Still, City Manager Joe Gilmore said he wanted more clarity in the overall process as a way to let the public know the city does monitor speeding and traffic-safety issues. To that end, the city will begin publishing a monthly traffic safety log and, according to a document shared during the meeting, the city has hired more traffic officers and expanded traffic enforcement periods to 14 days.
The city has no plans to immediately build speed bumps or otherwise redesign streets or lower speed limits, however. Such measures require traffic studies and then documented need, not just neighborhood support.
“I understand not everyone will be satisfied with this,” said Gilmore. “We’re trying to improve this issue. We have more traffic officers out there working. We have more grants … There’s a whole list of new engineering options we have in our toolkit and this is just letting you know where we’re at.”
Anyway, some streets that have long been targets of public complaint aren’t that bad, city officials argue. Police Chief Bob Kampwirth said police recently set up on Meacham and noted most speeders were only going one or two miles per hour over the limit.
Kampwirth said he’s done four such studies in the last year on different streets, all of which showed similar results—there are speeders, but there’s not a sustained problem on any of the streets studied.
A memo the city released as part of the discussion defined problematic speeding as about 10 miles over the posted speed limit by more than 15 % of drivers. In other words, some people will always speed, and speed laws and infrastructure will not change based on a few bad drivers.
A handful of residents weighed in on the issue, and one man said the main problem is a lack of ticketing. He pointed out that Chicago has automated speed cameras which generate a ticket for anyone driving over six miles per hour. Park Ridge doesn’t have speed cameras, but Michael Hendricks said flesh-and-blood officers could also write tickets.
“If someone is going over 10 miles per hour, give them a ticket,” he said. “Give out tickets, teach them a lesson.”
Kampwirth said anyone can call to report a speeding problem.
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“They can call the police department and speak to a traffic officer and we’ll handle it from there,” he said.
Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Piomeer Press.