Traffic calming can speed up drivers' ire

Searching for a break in the traffic, pedestrian Nancy Widmer watches car after car plow through the white-striped crosswalk. She finally gives up.

"They should put a [traffic] light in here," Ms. Widmer exclaims, gesturing at the street packed with commuters emerging from a quiet Alexandria, Va., neighborhood. "It's crazy."

Crossing a busy residential road at mid-block in this densely populated Washington suburb can be a challenge – even after rush hour. But the notorious stretch of road confronting Widmer on this sunny morning used to be worse.

Alexandria recently installed four flat-topped speed humps – known as "speed tables" – along a quarter-mile stretch, flanked by a park and a supermarket. Those humps reduced average speeds by nearly 25 miles an hour and cut traffic by up to 7 percent.

"They definitely have helped slow traffic," Widmer says. But in her next breath, she admits having some conflicting feelings: "As a pedestrian, I appreciate them. As a driver, I hate them."

Many drivers have a similar sense of ambiguity about traffic-calming measures as more cities try to change bad driving behavior and make neighborhood streets more pedestrian-friendly.

Cities are also installing textured crosswalks, traffic circles, and sidewalk "bulb-outs" that remove the shoulder and extend walkways up to the road. Speed humps and tables, however, are the most common devices used, according to a study by the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

Such measures have been a fixture on many European roads since the late 1960s, according to the ITE. In the US, though, such devices didn't catch on beyond such cities as Berkeley, Calif., and Eugene, Ore.

"Traffic calming is still a new phenomenon in our country," says Dan Burden, executive director of Walkable Communities Inc., a Florida-based nonprofit that advises neighborhoods how to become more pedestrian-friendly.

Today, more communities are finally addressing citizens' complaints about traffic, he says. But the solutions usually are "site specific" and often result in an abundance of "unwarranted stop signs." This approach creates new problems, Mr. Burden says, like "jack-rabbit driving," in which drivers quickly accelerate and break hard between signs.

Most municipalities, in fact, stumble through a series of stages before they reach a level of understanding about how to effectively address traffic problems, Burden notes.

For example, in the mid-1990s, Montgomery County, Md., moved rapidly to install speed humps throughout the suburban county. This led to a backlash that included an "antihump" petition and a lawsuit. In 1998, the county placed a moratorium on new speed humps. While it has since lifted the ban, the county significantly tightened its traffic-calming eligibility rules.

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