Colwood residents wanting traffic slowed on their streets will have to get the majority of their neighbours on board before the municipality will consider it.
Colwood has adopted a new policy identifying what types of roads will be considered for traffic calming and requiring neighbourhood consensus on changes.
Mayor Carol Hamilton said establishing a policy means council won’t have “knee-jerk reactions” to traffic calming requests.
“This kind of stabilizes approval and puts some parameters out there for people to look at and then see what other options there might be,” she said.
The municipality has not been faced with a lot of requests to slow down traffic, but more are inevitable as growth occurs, Hamilton said.
“Development is expanding in neighbourhoods, so before it becomes an issue, before we have that knee-jerk reaction, let’s set this groundwork,” she said.
“Here’s what we’re thinking and this is the way we’d like to see it happen.”
Under the new policy:
• New traffic calming requests will not be considered for arterial roads.
• Before implementing traffic calming measures on collector or local roads, improvements will be considered to adjacent arterial roads to keep traffic flowing smoothly.
• New traffic calming requests will not be considered for collector roads, except in front of a school or park, unless all other options have been exhausted.
• When a new traffic calming measure is considered, a city survey will be circulated. Fifty per cent of residents surveyed must return it, and 75 per cent of the returned surveys must support it.
• Physical traffic calming measures (such as speed bumps) will be considered before regulatory measures that require enforcement (such as decreasing the speed limit).
• Ocean Boulevard between Lagoon Road and the Lagoon Bridge is considered first and foremost a park, as opposed to a collector road.
