Cars Rarely Speed in Residential Areas. That Doesn't Make Them Safe.
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Michel Durand-Wood’s blog, Dear Winnipeg. It is shared here with permission. In-line images were provided by the author.
I’m going to cut to the chase. You’re almost certainly wrong if you think cars are speeding down your residential street. There, I said it.
I mean, that’s if “speeding” means exceeding the speed limit to you. Which it probably does.
Oh sure, it does happen in some places. Like on Cambridge Street in my city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. A traffic study commissioned in February 2024 showed that between 1% and 40% of vehicles exceeded the posted speed limit of 50 kph (30 mph), depending on the segment of street.
That’s why last month, more than a year after that study was approved, the city finally approved physical traffic calming measures to be installed on and around Cambridge Street in order to increase safety in that neighborhood. This was a big deal, it was in the news and everything!
Now, if 14 months seems like an unreasonable amount of time to deal with speeding traffic on the street where you live, you should know that the people living there have actually been advocating for slowing traffic in their neighborhood for more than 30 years.
They even dug up a traffic study from 1994 that proves that this has been a problem in their neighborhood for a very long time. Yet, despite identifying child safety and high vehicle speeds as issues to be addressed, that nearly 150-page study didn’t even measure vehicle speeds. I guess we’ll never know for sure if drivers were consistently driving over the speed limit in the 1990s, but it’s possible they weren’t. That might also be why the traffic calming measures listed in that report never got installed.
Engineers tend to have very strict rules for when traffic calming is “warranted.” Don’t meet the criteria? Sorry bubs, then traffic calming is not “warranted” on your street.
Let me give you an example from my neighborhood. In June 2004, a full 73% of residents on Hart Avenue signed a petition to the city to install speed bumps to slow traffic in front of their homes.
This led to a multi-year traffic study that would examine whether speed bumps were warranted. At the time, you had to meet at least one of these criteria:
Average Speed exceeds the speed limit; OR
At least 15% of vehicles exceed the speed limit by 5 kph or more; OR
At least 10% of vehicles exceed the speed limit by 10 kph or more
After measuring traffic speeds for five years, here were the results of the Hart Avenue Traffic Study:
It turns out only 5% of vehicles were ever “speeding” — ie. exceeding the speed limit by 5 kph or more. Not only that, but 85% of vehicles were traveling below 44-49 kph. In fact, the average vehicle traveled between 33-37 kph.
And yet, 73% of residents here felt so strongly that vehicles were speeding that they organized together to sign a petition to the city to do something about it.
So sorry, Hart Avenue residents, you’re wrong. No traffic calming for you.
Interestingly, a quick search for “traffic calming” in the city’s records reveals nearly 500 results for traffic study reports that were presented to the Public Works committee in the last 10 years alone. Multiply each of those by the petition threshold needed to trigger a study in the first place, and that makes a LOT of people who think traffic is going too fast in their neighborhoods.
And yet, you’ll struggle to find even a handful of those studies that led to traffic calming measures being implemented. Because the actual data shows that cars are, generally, not actually speeding. Often, they’re even going well below the posted speed limit.
What gives?
Could it be that the speed that feels safe to humans and the current speed limits in our neighborhoods are not the same?
How could this be? The current speed limits were set based on rigorous scientific evidence, right?
Right?
RIGHT??
Well, according to Wes Marshall, PhD, a licensed professional engineer, professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Denver (where he holds a joint appointment in urban planning), and the author of "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System," it seems they, uh (checks notes), were not.
If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. But only if you won’t be shocked to learn that the “science” behind setting some of our modern-day speed limits involved asking “a bunch of college kids from UCLA to self-report how fast they drive” in the 1950s. Or a study in the 1960s that “just asked drivers how fast they were going, even after a crash.” And even though many a study was usually specific to high-speed rural highways, “that didn’t stop traffic engineers from applying it everywhere.”
Which brings me back to “speeding.” Humans have evolved with the ability for self-preservation, so we can usually sense when we’re in danger. What we haven’t evolved with is an internal speed radar. That means we can tell when a car is traveling too fast for our safety, but we’re not able to put a number on that speed.
We’ve been led to believe, over the span of decades, that 50 kph (30 mph) is an appropriate speed for areas where people live, play, walk, and wait for the bus. But our self-preservation instincts would disagree.
That would explain why, even 30 years later, the residents of Hart Avenue still feel cars are traveling too fast on their street. Here’s a photo of the street today:
The bottom line is this: if hundreds of traffic studies show that people think cars are speeding on their street while the data says they’re not, it’s not the people who are wrong. It’s the speed limit.
There’s a report coming soon to the Public Works committee on the residential speed limit pilot that tested both 30 kph (20 mph) and 40 kph (25 mph) speed limits in four different neighborhoods in the city. The report will either recommend changing all residential speed limits to 30 or 40 kph, or it'll recommend leaving the status quo at 50 kph (30 mph).
Changing to 30 kph is what we’ve been asking for for decades, even if we didn’t know it yet. But we do now. If you’re in Winnipeg, contact your city councilor and ask them to support the change.
If you’re not from Winnipeg, reach out to your city officials about streets that feel unsafe in your community. Send them the Beyond Blame report so they can start identifying and addressing the design elements that encourage speeding.
Because if it doesn’t feel safe, it usually isn’t.
Michel Durand-Wood lives in the Winnipeg neighborhood of Elmwood with his wife and three children. He writes at DearWinnipeg.com, a really fun blog about infrastructure and municipal finance. He has no formal training or education in city planning, municipal finance, infrastructure maintenance, or anything else he talks about. He's just a guy, in love with a city, asking it to make better use of his tax dollars.