CITIZEN JOURNALISM:
An uprising is sweeping city and suburban streets in the Washington metropolitan area. The uprising described in the vernacular of the Institute of Transportation Engineers as “typically 12 to 14 feet in length; shapes include parabolic, circular, and sinusoidal and range between 3 and 4 inches with trend toward 3 - 3 1/2 inches maximum” - involves speed bumps, or “speed humps,” cropping up all over regional roadways.
But the intensifying groundswell is not an effort by local governments and law-enforcement agencies to install more traffic-calming measures. Instead it is citizens petitioning and demanding quick response to their request to place speed humps on their streets, local transportation officials said.
“There has been no shift in policy. Whether city residents want speed humps or not, we are ensuring that we are more responsive to the community’s requests and demands,” said John Lisle, spokesman for the District Department of Transportation.
The number of speed humps in the District is “constantly changing,” Mr. Lisle acknowledged, but said the seeming proliferation is more likely the result of “streamlining” the petition process by the administration of D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who was elected in November 2006.
“We do know that before [fiscal year] 2006, there were approximately 50 speed humps. Now we have nearly 700,” he said.
According to WTOP-FM, the District averages one speed hump for every 1.5 miles, Montgomery County one for every 2.2 miles, and Fairfax County one for every 14.5 miles.
Montgomery Council Executive Officer Isiah “Ike” Leggett is responding to citizens’ growing demands by taking steps to improve the process to make it easier for county residents to petition for speed humps on their street, said Tracy Wroe, an engineer with the Montgomery County Department of Transportation’s Division of Traffic Engineering and Operations.
There are currently just fewer than 1,200 speed humps in the county.
There are two proposed substantive changes to the current petition process, Mr. Wroe said. Currently, to be considered for speed-hump replacement, 100 vehicles per hour must pass through the street in question. The proposed changes would allow for a reduction in required volume if it is documented that the street has a more excessive speed problem, he said.
At 1 Cut Above on Georgia Avenue in Sandy Spring, Md., patrons debated speed humps, even though some of the patrons had not yet graduated from middle school and didn’t possess a driver’s license.
“Speed bumps; I’m all for,” says Tim Carey, who has been a barber for 33 years. “I’ve seen many a speed bump in my day and I’ve lived to tell about it.”
Crossing the border into the District is A Sharper Image, a barbershop in Northwest, where the chatter was unified against speed humps.
Errol Wilson, who has been a barber for eight years, said he has informally observed the increase of speed humps throughout the District, noticeably during Mr. Fenty’s administration.
“I’d have to agree. … On Gallatin Street Northwest, those speed bumps weren’t there before,” he said.
One client adamantly sighed and said, “You can’t even drive through some parts of Southeast anymore. Wheeler Road? OK. If somebody needs help down there, what is the ambulance going to do? Go five miles an hour? Good luck stopping that cardiac arrest. They’re DOA because of those bumps there.”
Speed humps, which are one of many methods falling under the larger umbrella of traffic-calming measures have a long and aggravated history in the metropolitan area, Mr. Wroe said.
Speed humps first appeared in Montgomery County in fiscal 1995. In 1997, county officials instituted a moratorium, which they lifted in 1998.
Mr. Wroe began working for Montgomery County in January 1999, shortly after the countywide moratorium was lifted. He said the moratorium was enacted because of county residents’ concerns about the potential delays to fire, rescue and emergency vehicles.
“Traffic calming slows speeding traffic to residential streets without restricting access to them,” according to data on the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) Web site. It further states, “Drawbacks [of speed humps] include: slows emergency vehicles, drainage problems, increased noise from braking and acceleration of vehicles, particularly buses and trucks and maintenance cost.”
For proponents of speed humps, ITE statistics indicate that “traffic volumes have been reduced on average by 18 percent” and that “collisions have been reduced on average by 13 percent” as a result of speed humps.
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