Council to reconsider speed reductions
Councillor Connie Leishman will be bringing forward a motion to reconsider the speed reductions on Fairgrounds Road, Riverside Drive and Concession 6 North passed at the March 7 meeting.
The item is on the agenda for the March 21 meeting.
A group of people opposed to lowering speed limits on several local roads to 60 km/hr are taking it upon themselves to survey the residents of Fairgrounds Road and Concession 6 to ask their opinion, believing the majority should rule.
They are calling into question whether council has followed the township’s policies and procedures in making the decision and ask if the majority of residents don’t have concerns about speed on their roads, who does?
A group representing nine employers with a combined total workforce of 167, including Paul Van Staveren, Gord Zeggil and Judith Crawford say that the decision to lower speeds is not justified because it has not been proven that the roads are unsafe.
Also on Monday’s agenda, Zeggil is scheduled to make a deputation to council.
Zeggil questions Clearview’s Traffic Assessment Study results saying collision data was not included, that the threshold for speeding is too low at 10 km/hr over the speed limit, and that speeds are inflated by emergency vehicles.
The group’s main concern is that there has not been adequate public consultation, and they feel like the voice of the people is being ignored.
“You can’t use our Traffic Calming Policy to enact the traffic assessment study findings and then say that it doesn’t apply,” said Zeggil. “The main thing that didn’t take place was consulting the public. That’s the one thing they left out. This is a democratic society and we can see what happens around the world when our politicians don’t follow democratic process.”
“It’s wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong,” said Zeggil. “That’s what bothers me as a taxpaying citizen when you see what’s going on in this world. It all starts in grassroots communities like ours, and it has to stop, and that’s why people have risen up.”
He disagrees with Councillor Thom Paterson’s take that the policy doesn’t apply.
The Traffic Calming Policy, approved in July 2019, does not apply to arterial roads, but Fairgrounds Road, Concession 10, Concession 6/ Riverside Drive are all considered Local Roads in the Township Official Plan. Deputy director of public works Dan Perreault said staff is reviewing the classification because they no longer function as local roads, due to increased volume and changing uses.
Representatives of the opposition have been knocking on doors along affected portions of road. They found that of the households on Fairgrounds Road and Concession 6, about three- quarters wanted to maintain the current speed limit of 80 km/hr and the balance agreed with lowering the speed limit to 60 km/hr (or were not at home). They found that with Concession 6 North residents, only a couple of occupants were not aware of the proposed speed reduction. There was a consensus that more police enforcement is needed, either way.
Paterson said road safety is an ongoing concern in the whole of Clearview Township. He has been hearing from concerned residents on Fairgrounds Road since 2019, which prompted traffic calming measures, including the creation of the policy, the purchase of radar signs, the traffic assessment study, and line painting, all leading up to the eventual decision on speeds.
Paterson said he has received survey results from residents that support lowering speeds. In a poll of residents on this section of Fairgrounds Road, respondents identified blind hills, hidden driveways and overgrown vegetation as factors contributing to poor driver visibility. Speeding and lack of police enforcement were named as factors adding to resident concerns. Narrow pavement, steep ditches, lack of guard rails, lack of a centre line and resultant unsafe motor vehicle passing were named as factors adding to the risk to oncoming vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians.
Of the 50 respondents to the survey questions, 68 per cent indicated concern about safety on the road, 70 per cent noticed an increase in volume, 66 per cent noticed an increase in speed, 68 per cent were in favour of adopting safety measures and improvements to the road and 54 per cent were in favour of reducing speed to 60 km/hr or lower.
When asked to choose from a list of possible safety measures, 70 per cent wanted no-passing signage, 50 per cent wanted slow down signage, 46 per cent wanted blind curve, blind driveway ahead signage and 38 per cent wanted a separated bike lane.
Paterson acknowledges that there is a segment of drivers who feel the roads are very safe but there is another that does not.
“There is no doubt that there is a strong advocacy for people wanting to improve the safety on the road, as they use it,” said Paterson. “[Council] may have been overly focussed, for good reason on those who don’t want it and we may have forgotten the reason why we got here in the first place. Literally, it was because of the people on Fairgrounds Road that got us to look at it in a more focussed way and build a framework for decision making that we could more consistently use across the whole township.”
“My biggest fear is that we are now going to disregard a process that we’ve developed to make decisions that are fact-based, initiated by public opinion, but public opinion in this process gives way to the final analysis from our staff to make a decision in the public interest,” said Paterson. “That’s the difficult part to navigate because not all public opinions can be satisfied.”
He said the decision is being made from a technical design point of view. On Fairgrounds Road it’s because of the hills and on Concession 6, it’s because of the curves and the hills. The alternative is to undertake costly road improvements to widen andflatten the road.
Paterson admits that public consultation on the issue could be improved but says that he has made every effort to engage the community on the topic at a time when he hasn’t been able to hold town hall meetings.
“However, the argument they are making that we didn’t follow our procedure, which is injurious to the whole concept of having good process, is not true,” said Paterson… “That is for urban streets, for residential streets. The principles are the same, we should engage the public. But in this case we are talking about rural roads.”
He said a separate policy for rural roads are in the works.
