This was a public meeting about the critical topic of traffic calming. Here's a good introductory video from Justine Underhill for anybody who wants a primer on the concept. Here is the Sandy Springs City Council meeting.
My perception is that staff is doing the best they can within the confines of the instructions they have. The council members more active in the discussion are trying to help, but want to give high level support without personally getting into planning details. Between the two, the conversation kinda meanders around what tweaks to make given where the city code is now. Some meaningful ideas get brought up, but still anchored to the status quo. In my opinion there's no single speaker with both a clear view about what goal the city should pursue and also enough authority to speak aspirationally in a public meeting at the risk of criticizing the status quo. Below I'll recap the discussion with the timestamp (minutes:seconds) of noteworthy moments.
At the highest level, this whole discussion is backwards. Sandy Springs is full of people who want to use our public spaces more. In particular, full of children who would like to ride bikes around their neighborhoods, to local stores, or to school. If you don't believe this, talk to more kids, it's no secret. We don't have crash data for those trips because those trips don't happen, and they don't happen because parents understand that most of our streets are too dangerous for children to go alone. Starting an analysis of whether traffic calming is needed by observing trips that happen, while ignoring all the ones that don't, means never fixing our most obvious safety problems.
Meeting Minutes
Starting around 5:20: Preceeding the traffic calming discussion, there's a contractual update to provide free parking in the underground garage at City Springs for major events (Juneteenth, Star and Stripes, Sparkle Sandy Springs) rather than charging hourly parking rates. Everyone on the council supports it. I get it, it feels nice, but this is bad policy. As a financial matter, the city spent a lot of money building that underground garage such that it's more convenient than alternate parking lots further away. Now that we have it, the garage is an asset that should be used to generate revenue for the city. Also, making it free for drivers is kinda unfair for everyone who attends without needing to use it, why not do something nice for people walking, biking, or riding transit too?
The purported justification is to avoid delays by getting rid of payment for drivers leaving the garage. However, this ignores that traffic is unavoidable when a crowd leaves City Springs all at once. Furthermore, given that there will be traffic, it's better for drivers to slowly leave the garage, i.e. to contain the traffic jam in there as much as possible, rather than to let drivers rush out and jam up the nearby streets. Either way drivers can only leave as slow as the street network allows.
After a July 4th fireworks show I watched Sandy Springs police doing traffic control and favoring departing drivers over Roswell Rd traffic so much that a MARTA bus unable to turn from Johnson Ferry onto Roswell went off route and skipped the stop closest to City Springs. This parking fee change will only make the resulting congestion on nearby streets at the moment an event ends worse as drivers leave the garage more rapidly and cause a more intense traffic problem. But there will still be traffic, so drivers won't actually be able to leave faster. Fundamentally, speeding up the exit from the garage is the wrong approach to minimizing delays for departing drivers, because the delay is caused by an excessive volume of vehicles in too short a time. The best response is transit. MARTA isn't going to work for everyone, but every passenger that takes it is one less vehicle causing traffic after these events, and the city could contract for higher service levels. Alternatively, find activities to keep attendees around such that they slowly leave rather than all doing so at the same time. That way that departing drivers don't cause such a spike in traffic.
This policy is all about neighborhoods, not the larger city streets where more people are hurt by crashes or where it's already harder to travel without an automobile. In my opinion this tension between the nominal goal (slowing down drivers, safety) with the limited geography (our slowest and safest streets) really sets up a lot of the meandering in the subsequent discussion.
One way to reconcile this tension is that neighborhood streets should be not merely safer than large steets, but just plain safe. Safe the way going down a grocery store aisle is safe, even for children or people using a wheelchair. However, the discussion centers around managing these primarily as spaces for drivers to conveniently pass through, not as safe spaces for Sandy Springs' residents. That is a policy choice, and if we look elsewhere we can see better answers.
11:20 Sometimes in lieu of building in traffic calming, police monitor a neighborhood and enforce traffic laws. Per the presenter, often many neighborhood residents are stopped. No mention of what the long term impact is, but I hope most of them slow down permanently. This policy would be more effective if it happened without neighborhood conversations so drivers didn't know when to expect it. Police could be rotating around neighborhoods to detect the ambient level of dangerous driving, and looking for behavior other than speeding as well (running stop signs, texting, etc).
12:05 Regarding putting traffic calming treatments on hills, Sandy Springs is a very hilly area, people are speeding down a street, your car naturally is going faster down a hill. But that is not a safe place to put a treatment, so it has to be fairly flat.
This statement seems so illogical to me that I must be misunderstanding the presenter, who I know to be knowledgeable. We know drivers speed down hills and the group that manages this neighborhood traffic calming process observes that behavior. That speeding is the danger. This statement is backwards because we need these treatments especially there to remind drivers to avoid speeding up. It's also objectively not a correct statement about Sandy Springs' infrastructure, I know of speed humps on downhill neighborhood slopes in Sandy springs. So I don't think this is actually city policy, and I genuinely don't understand what this statement meant but nobody asked for clarification.
32:40 A slide with staff's ideas for modifying the existing policy.
First idea is to be more selective about how a neighborhood gets into the program. With a focus on what to do if one person requests a change but the neighborhood overall doesn't support it. This suggestion is unclear to me. If professionals think a road is dangerous, why should they wait for a neighborhood wide response to act? People are very bad at judging low probability risks like that, and it's hard to organize people who are busy with everything else going on in their lives. Council member Bauman emphasizes this later on.
34:00 Considers the cost benefit for low volume streets, e.g., cul-de-sacs. But if drivers are speeding that's still a safety risk, and probably they're also being unsafe when they get out of their neighborhood. I think people on low volume roads should also feel safe going outside without an automobile. There's a troubling tension between the city deciding to go to the expense of paving a road but then deciding the traffic volume is too low to warrant making it safe. This is really where the elected council members should step in and put their authority behind the use of funds, and I believe at least a handful of them share my sentiment.
33:45 Staff recommends altering the criteria for approving traffic calming measure from 8 to 10 mph, i.e., requiring the 85th percentile of drivers to be 10 mph over the speed limit before taking action. They cite neighboring jurisdictions, which seems irrelevant, there is no advantage to having this particular criteria be the same across jurisdiction unless 10 mph is substantively better. No reasoning for that is presented. Why would you want the city to target 85 percent of drivers going up to 10 mph over the posted speed limit in your neighborhood, and 15 percent of drivers going even more than that? I.e., if the speed limit is 25 mph, and a hundred people drive on your street, then more than fifteen of them would have to drive 36 mph or more before the city takes action. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the risk of pedestrian injury in the event of a crash goes from 3% at 25 mph to 22% at 36 mph! That is obviously unsafe to me. It is also arbitrary. What I suspect is happening is that the cost benefit analysis for these traffic calming measures in neighborhoods is tough, given how these roads are already relatively safe compared to other city streets, so this cutoff is needed to limit expenditures. If so, we should be upfront about it instead of hiding behind this methodology which seems nonsensical as a matter of safety.
34:15 Recommends removing treatment options that require reconstruction (e.g., roundabouts) in neighborhoods. Maybe that's too expensive for this program, but there should be some other program where it's considered so if a road is rebuilt (new pavement, sidewalks, etc) then these changes can be incorporated. Chamblee has done those for major streets, and Sandy Springs should pursue those policies in those especially dangerous areas with heavy vehicle traffic.
38:00 Council member Bauman asks at what point city says we are going to do this based on objective safety risks, regardless of neighborhood feedback.
39:00 - 44:16 Council member Bauman begins a discussion about this neighborhood program vs safety action plan. Why have this narrow program? Emphasizes his desire to get more traffic calming measures built, but he seems to still be talking in the confines of this narrow neighborhood program and not speeding up the larger safety action plan.
44:15 Council member Reichel begins to make a similar point to what I wrote up top, about neighborhoods wanting to protect children in the streets before crashes occur.
I know that we look at the accidents but aren't a lot of these request for traffic calming because children are in the neighborhood and maybe in the streets and they're trying to slow people down so it's not necessarily because there have been accidents in the neighborhood.
I could be biased but my interpretation is that the intent was to pivot the conversation toward proactive safety so children can enjoy our public spaces, and away from reactive responses to crashes. That's not how the response to the question went, and there was no follow up unfortunately. The staff member emphasizes that she follows state code when walking her dog and walks facing traffic to avoid having a driver sneak up behind her, but doesn't really get to the difficulty of children's safety. The fact that she feels the need to emphasize how vigilant she is on her street is a red flag that the street has been made safe for drivers but not for other users, and certainly not safe enough for children. In particular, at 45:33 ,
When we have a posted speed of 25 miles per hour in a neighborhood, that's what we should be going
contradicts the earlier staff guidance to allow 85% of drivers to go 35 mph before building any traffic calming treatments.
48:20 Council member Bauman points out we're a pass through city, in support of more safety measures. Our roads should not be more dangerous for residents just to enable faster commutes for drivers going elsewhere. 49:00 Council member Paulson points out, if the data and staff supports active measures, it should be done. If the data does not clearly support it, but a neighborhood supports it, he doesn't want to get involved. Either criteria on its own seems sufficient to me. If neighborhoods that are relatively safe collectively decide that they want to be even safer, with less or slower driving, that seems great as long as they're not displacing traffic onto other streets. People should feel safe being on their neighborhood roads, not just driving through them. 51:00 Mayor Paul says that "we have speed humps or speed control devices that firetrucks have a difficult time maneuvering through". Seems there should be a separate discussion about the city exploring smaller fire trucks, to save costs and enable safer road design. There has been reporting that, in part due to consolidation in the industry, large purpose built fire trucks have gotten more expensive and delivery times keep getting longer. Maybe Sandy Springs can find more creative ways to find vehicles that meet the safety needs of houses on small neighborhood roads and also are able to navigate these speed control devices more easily. 53:45 Mayor Paul says maybe we'll have some sort of public hearing later on to solicit feedback, which I would support.
