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Residential limit of 40 km/h?

City may reduce speed limit to increase safety

By: Bartley Kives

Posted: 09/12/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Also on the city's agenda

Plastic-bag ban: There will be no ban on plastic bags in Winnipeg, as Couns. Dan Vandal (St. Boniface), Brian Mayes (St. Vital), Devi Sharma (Old Kildonan) and Jenny Gerbasi (Fort Rouge) voted unanimously to accept a water-and-waste department's recommendation to continue a public-education campaign about reusing bags and reducing waste instead.
Transportation authority: The committee voted unanimously to hold off on approving a potentially $1.25-million study to launch a regional transportation authority that could serve areas outside Winnipeg. Councillors scolded Winnipeg Transit for only publishing the details one day before they committee met.

Don't sell your sports car just yet, but Winnipeg could join several other Canadian cities in dropping the residential-street speed limit to 40 kilometres per hour.

City council's public works committee voted Tuesday to give city transportation planners three months to explore the idea of reducing speeds on residential streets -- two-lane roads in residential neighbourhoods -- by 10 km/h.

Such a move would require provincial approval, if the city's public works department determines it's a good idea. Two councillors who do not drive -- Couns. Harvey Smith (Daniel McIntyre) and Ross Eadie (Mynarski) -- raised the idea in a city council motion that automatically wound up before the public works committee.

Their effort gained steam when Dr. Lynne Warda of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority lent the medical profession's weight to the notion of reducing speeds on narrower streets, a move she said would save lives.

Edmonton and Montreal have implemented a 40 km/h residential speed limit, she said. And in U.S. and the U.K., the reduction of residential speed limits has led to a measurable reduction in the severity of injuries resulting from vehicle-pedestrian and vehicle-bicycle collisions, she told the committee Tuesday.

"Whenever you reduce the speed limit, you're going to have an impact on all of those," Warda said following the meeting, describing the reduction as having a small but statistically significant effect.

"It may be only a few kilometres an hour it brings down speed. When you have a posted speed limit of 50, those people are driving 55 to 58. They're not driving 50," she said.

Winnipeg transportation manager Luis Escobar told the committee he agrees there's a difference between the posted speed limit and the speed people actually drive, but reducing the speed limit provides a false sense of security.

He said collisions causing injury in Winnipeg have dropped to approximately 2,100 in 2010 from 3,400 in 2001, even though the overall number of collisions has remained static during that time period.

Nonetheless, Couns. Dan Vandal (St. Boniface), Brian Mayes (St. Vital), Devi Sharma (Old Kildonan) and Jenny Gerbasi (Fort Rouge) voted in favour of studying the idea.

Committee chairman Vandal said he wants to see hard evidence a reduction in residential speed limits will save lives and does not believe this issue ranks high among the city's priorities.

But he agreed it would be relatively inexpensive to implement a residential speed-zone reduction, as all the city would need to do is post signs stating the limit is 40 km/h unless otherwise noted.

A report from the public works department is expected in December.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 12, 2012 B1

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