How to Calm a Street, Starting with Your Own Anger

Cars used to speed 40 mph down the street past my little toddlers playing in our unfenced front yard in Anchorage, Alaska. The street was on the sunny side of our house, just beyond a little flower garden and a couple bushes. The front yard was the best spot to hang out and play. 

The speed limit was 25 mph, but because of the design of the street, a quarter-mile long straightaway with no stop signs, people rarely drove the limit. I felt I could never take my eyes off my kids, even though they were trained not to go into the roadway. 

It’s every parent’s nightmare to hear that screech of brakes and…well, I can’t finish that sentence.

Above is my old street in Anchorage, Alaska.

The thought of my worst fear coming true led me to try many solutions to address the speeding. Some attempts were more ridiculous than others. When I heard an engine start to wind up down at the corner while I was shoveling snow, I’d walk out in the middle of the street and stand in the road, leaning on my shovel. I’d introduce myself when the driver stopped and ask them to please slow down, explaining that my kids are playing here.

That didn’t always go well. 

We put up one of those signs under our mailbox that said, “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here.” We asked the city for speed humps, but they didn’t want firetrucks to have to slow down. At one point, I was so frustrated that I had a 5-gallon bucket full of tennis balls in muddy water ready to hurl at the windshields of speeding drivers. You can imagine how poorly that might have gone. 

Put yourself in this setting, with this kind of parental anxiety, and then imagine a beloved local landscaper losing both her legs to someone speeding down the street while she was loading her trailer at the end of a job. What would you do? 

This scenario became all too real last July on Eldridge Avenue, a small 25 mph secondary arterial in the town of Bellingham, Washington. The driver who slammed into Kim Eagle while she was loading her landscaping trailer was impaired by crystal methamphetamine and sentenced to a prison term, according to the Bellingham Herald newspaper. Not long before that, an allegedly impaired driver raised the alert level on the street by shearing off a light pole in a high-speed collision.

Eldridge Avenue in Bellingham, WA.

Neighbors Take Action

Residents of the neighborhood along Eldridge Avenue were frustrated by what they perceived as the city’s lack of response to traffic-calming requests. So they consulted resources recommended by Strong Towns on the concept of “tactical urbanism,” where a neighborhood implements small, affordable steps to address a problem from the bottom up. 

They created their own traffic-calming infrastructure. They built curb “bump outs” to narrow the roadway, consistent with the city’s design guidelines, but with vinyl pylons, traffic cones, chalk, and flowers instead of concrete. It cost them $250. 

One of the community members who worked on the traffic-calming project, Sachin Pai, has three elementary-school-aged children who live in the neighborhood along Eldridge Avenue. Pai said the city told them traffic calming was not allowed on streets classified as secondary arterials. “We wanted a short-term solution we could implement in two weeks, rather than a project identified in a six-year timeline.” 

So one Saturday morning they just did it. The change was immediate. A local public radio station produced a short video report—here’s what it looked like: 

“A majority of the neighbors were incredibly excited because they’d been trying for years to do something,” Pai said. “An overwhelming majority were happy.” 

According to Pai, one person who was upset ended up taking the cones down that afternoon, the same Saturday the cones went up. “‘You’re slowing down traffic,’ he told me and I said, “That’s the point,’” Pai recalled. “We put (the cones) back up.”  

Monday morning, the public works department came and took them down.

The Reaction by the City of Bellingham

The person who ordered the community’s traffic-calming project removed is Eric Johnston, Public Works Director for the city of Bellingham. Johnston has worked for the city for more than a decade, starting as a city traffic engineer and taking the public works helm in 2019. He knows the streets of this Western Washington town as well as anyone. In a 45-minute conversation, Johnston didn’t strike me as a cranky old man ignoring the pleas of the public. 

The Eldridge Avenue community’s traffic-calming project was in conformance with design standards, but it was not signed off by a professional licensed engineer, Johnston said. 

“It’s never appropriate to install traffic control without the permission of the regulatory authority,” he said. “As a human being I recognize the need for safety and addressing people’s concerns… I don’t discount their frustrations. I have the same ones. It’s normal and natural, but it doesn’t mean we take the law into our own hands. We follow the law.”

Traffic-calming measures implemented by locals around Eldridge Avenue. The cones were removed by the city’s public works department.

Johnston said he’s an advocate of reimagining public roadway space so it becomes safer, slower, and shared between walkers, bicyclists, and automobiles. He supports the Strong Towns approach to re-prioritizing safety and cost savings over speed and traffic volume. While he’s worked for the city, Bellingham has made it into the Sweet 16 round of the Strongest Town contest and hosted talks by Strong Towns founder and president, Charles Marohn. 

“We’re not conventional, in the sense of traffic engineering, that we prioritize cars over walkers and bicyclists in our designs,” Johnston said. “Bellingham has our priorities straight…we remove space for vehicles and allocate it for others.”

Johnson said average daily volumes (in both directions) on Eldridge Avenue ranged from 7100 cars per day in 2005 to 7200 per day in 2014 to 5700 per day in 2022. It is one of the lower volume arterials in Bellingham. In his view, it’s not more dangerous than many others he’s addressing. There were the two serious collisions on Eldridge involving impaired drivers and another 35 collisions between 2016 and the present, including three with serious injuries, 18 non-injury collisions and 9 minor-injury collisions—but no fatalities. 

The 85th percentile speed, which traffic engineers use to evaluate roadway use and refers to the speed at or below which 85 percent of all vehicles are observed to travel under free-flowing conditions past a monitored point, is 34.9 mph. Fifteen percent of traffic goes faster. The average speed on Eldridge is 31 mph. Despite being well above the 25 mph posted speed limit, these speeds rank it well down the list of traffic-calming priorities in Bellingham, Johnston said. 

The City does have a prioritized plan for street redesign and traffic calming is tied to it, Johnston said. Voters in Bellingham approved a sales tax to fund non-motorized infrastructure and the city’s approach is tied to a bicycle–pedestrian plan, which focuses on safety, he said.

“We’ve made millions of dollars of investments in improvements…(some) are identified on Eldridge, but they haven’t made the priority list yet,” Johnston said, responding to the community’s claim they are not being heard. “There is a difference between being heard and not having things progress in the time frame that residents prefer.” 

“As we prioritize our work, we focus on social equity and school-age children in high-density, low-income neighborhoods where kids need improved infrastructure to move safely through their neighborhood,” Johnston said. 

The System, Not the Drivers, Needs to Be Fixed 

There was a community meeting planned last week with residents of Eldridge, the mayor of Bellingham, the Town Council president, the police chief, and Johnston, but a positive COVID test for the Mayor delayed it. For a brief period, the police department created a street monitoring project to try and assess the need for traffic calming on the street. Sachin Pai, the Eldridge parent, said the police told him they didn’t have the resources to continue that work.

When I asked Pai if his neighborhood was politically connected, technically astute, and financially more able to do tactical urbanism for traffic calming than other low-status neighborhoods with similar stats, he agreed that his neighborhood does enjoy such privileges. But he said his goal is to create a template for all Bellingham neighborhoods to take a more proactive approach to making their streets safer. He wrote a slide deck to be used as a model for others to use in creating tactical urbanism projects and accessing state grant monies to fund them. 

What I learned from my campaign on my old Anchorage neighborhood street is that no amount of signage, enforcement action, or angry dads with shovels in their hands will ever keep speeds down on a roadway. People will drive to the speed the road is engineered. 

On our old street in Anchorage, it was no coincidence that acceleration at one end of a flat, quarter-mile straightaway, with no obstacles, seemed like a drag strip. I mistakenly assigned my parental fear and anger and frustration onto the people driving on my street. They were just doing what the roadway design invited them to do: drive 40 mph on a relatively obstacle-free, flat, straight, quarter-mile stretch of roadway. 

There is no end to the number of traffic-calming features which can be inexpensively deployed to narrow a roadway and reduce speeds, from nylon curb bump outs to speed humps to protected bike lanes to on-street parallel parking, but local jurisdictions need to make room for policy managers like Eric Johnston and neighborhood leaders like Sachin Pai to work together on compromises. 

For now, on Eldridge Avenue and thousands of streets like it around North America, the law is the law. But a change is bound to come.

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