Speed cushions will be appearing on more than a dozen additional Saint John streets this year.
It is one of several initiatives the city is undertaking over the coming months to help improve traffic safety.
Public Works Director Tim O’Reilly said speed cushions are shown to slow average vehicle speeds.
“While we continue to rely heavily on community feedback to identify where these community speeding concerns are, we continue to use the city’s traffic calming policy and data to clarify which streets actually have excessive speeding,” O’Reilly told council last week.
Speed cushions are similar to speed bumps or humps but with gaps for wheel paths of emergency vehicles and select community vehicles, such as transit buses.
The city is installing speed cushions on 13 streets this year, more than triple the four they did last year, following a boost in funding by council.
- Champlain Drive
- Prince Street
- Wellesley Avenue
- Boars Head Road
- Green Head Road
- Mountain View Drive
- Churchill Boulevard
- Gault Road
- Hawthorne Avenue
- Ragged Point Road
- Brookview Crescent
- Milford Road
- Mount Pleasant Avenue East (temporary speed cushions)
“Just as an example, to generate this list of 13, we had to do 29 different speed surveys across the community, so the majority of them actually resulted in not a documented speeding issue,” said O’Reilly.
Accessible parking
The city also plans to improve the accessibility of at least five uptown parking spots this year.
O’Reilly said while the data shows the city currently has enough accessible spaces, many of them are within parking lots and garages rather than along city streets.
“The challenge is that available accessible parking standards are written for parking lots and parking garages rather than for application on existing city streets,” he said.
“City staff have worked with experts at Ability New Brunswick, and together we established a few variances from these available standards that will allow us to establish on-street spaces that are deemed truly accessible.”
That includes not surpassing grades of two per cent where possible using crosswalk curb ramps where possible.
Other initiatives include more accessible signalized crosswalks and installing bike lanes along Main Street, Broad Street and City Road/Station Street.
The city also plans to install a four-way stop at Loch Lomond Road and the Airport Arterial in advance of an eventual roundabout.
