City eyes 30 km/h speed limit for residential streets

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2015 (4079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The city’s public works chairwoman wants to see Winnipeg follow suit with Toronto and look at reducing residential street speed limits to 30 km/h.

While on break during Tuesday’s public works committee meeting, Coun. Janice Lukes said she would like to spearhead this measure by doing a pilot project in Fort Richmond, but the marching orders would have to come from the province first.

“That solves all of our problems with cycling, walking, to have a limited speeding amount for vehicles,” she said.

One idea she has is to piggyback off the work of former Daniel McIntyre Coun. Harvey Smith, who attempted to get speed zones lowered to from 50 km/h to 40 km/h in 2012. The motion was defeated by public works committee in early 2013, after an administrative report recommended against it. It said in the report that in cities such as Montreal and Edmonton, who reduced the speed limit in residential areas, they did not see a significant drop in the average speeds when they reduced the speed limit.

“I have to dig back into that and once things settle down at the province, I’d love to go back and spearhead this, even if we just pilot it and see what is does in a community,” she said.

Earlier this week, a community committee in Toronto voted in favour of reducing the speed limits in some residential areas of the city to 30 km/h

As opposed to a permanent change to the residential speed zones, Lukes said she would be open to investigating reducing the speeds on weekends or at certain times of the day.

“It is absolutely something in my tenure I will be looking at,” she said.

A request for comment has been made to the province.

kristin.annable@freepress.mb.ca