For the first time in 14 years, Boulder will restore funding to anti-speeding road treatments in residential areas.
In a unanimous vote just before midnight Tuesday, the City Council approved the terms for what will be known as the Neighborhood Speed Management Program.
This program, unlike others aimed at making streets safer, will focus exclusively on reducing speeding in Boulder, where neighborhood limits generally run at 25 mph or below throughout the city.
It’ll open with a modest budget: $300,000 was approved, but that amount will cover the salary of a new program coordinator, consultant fees, data collection and community engagement. As a result, only about half of the money will be available for actual physical mitigation, such as roundabouts, speed humps, traffic islands and digital speed displays that tell drivers how fast they’re going as they pass by.
So, with roughly $150,000 to spend in the first year of the program, staff can reasonably expect to get to a dozen or more smaller projects — a speed hump, for example, costs about $10,000 — or a handful of larger projects.
Neighbors will be able to petition for traffic-calming work where they live by collecting signatures from 20 neighbors or 30 percent of households on the block. Eligibility would be limited to blocks where data shows 85 percent of vehicles travel at speeds greater than 3 miles per hour above the posted speed limit.
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