Bradford’s plan for dealing with traffic in town is shifting gears and picking up speed.
About one dozen residents and seven members of council turned out to participate in the town’s second public information centre (PIC) about the upcoming traffic mitigation strategy at the Bradford Public Library Dec. 13.
The strategy is intended to create two separate guides: a design to ensure all new roads include traffic calming from the outset, and a traffic-calming document to ensure measures are added to existing streets using a consistent process based on measurable data.
Overseen by town staff and run by consultants from Arcadis IBI Group, the meeting had guests break into three groups, with each going through mock exercises to determine whether a roadway should receive traffic calming. Road type, location, length, connection to schools or businesses, the average daily traffic volumes and the average speed of traffic were all considered.
Stefan Sirianni, senior transportation engineer with Arcadis, led the meeting and acknowledged the “regimented process” can feel a bit “tedious,” but for good reason.
“There’s a lot of factors at play and it’s good to get the public engaging and understanding these aren’t made in a vacuum, these decisions, and they have a say in the process too to see what’s prioritized,” he said.
All the necessary data was provided to participants, who could then use it to give each road a score to determine if traffic calming should be applied, and if so, of what type.
Different options included pavement markings, bollards, road diets, community safety zones, road diversions, road closures, curb extensions, raised intersections and more, and participants were tasked with discussing which options were best for various different situations.
Then came a discussion about the costs to implement different options, which vary considerably.
Some options like bollards cost as little as $2,000 to implement, but some of the larger options, like curb extension or raised intersections cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 and the town’s current annual budget for traffic calming is only $35,000.
As a result, staff need to choose between implementing many affordable solutions or focusing on two or three more expensive options.
Marco Belperio and Mara Ferrante hadn’t attended this type of public meeting before and weren’t sure what to expect. Both felt there were “a lot of good ideas” shared.
“Now I have a good understanding of how they come up with these decisions,” Belperio said.
Ferrante agreed.
“I don’t think we really considered all the factors,” she said, explaining that as residents they present their complaints and hope the town will resolve them. “It was a little bit of an eye-opener. That was good, that was positive."
Ferrante moved to Bradford about one year ago, but had been regularly coming to town from Toronto to visit Belperio for about 11 years and noted “traffic has really changed over 10 years.”
Even living in a rural part of town, Belperio explained that the volume of traffic on their road has increased to the point where they don’t leave their home on a long weekend unless they really need to, or else they might get stuck in a line of cars.
While they understand their rural road probably wouldn’t qualify for traffic calming, they may still ask, now that they know which options might be considered appropriate.
Not everyone came away with such a positive experience, though.
“It was a little juvenile, a little primitive,” said Geoff Kee. “I understand what they’re trying to do, but it’s not an educational system.”
Kee felt the mock exercises weren’t detailed enough and gave people the wrong understanding of the criteria, suggesting it would have better to use real-world examples so participants could share their experiences and groups could brainstorm specific solutions to existing problems.
“Most people, they don’t care how you get it done, they just want you to get it done. They just want to see results,” he said.
While some of the traffic-calming options shared at the meeting might help “a little bit,” Kee felt more enforcement from police was the only reliable solution and pointed to the safety and speed enforcement campaigns that usually take place in August or September before the beginning of the school year.
“It’s that initial period that people are actually paying attention to what’s going on, because they know they’re going to get dinged,” he said, adding Bradford needs an approach that ensures “if you speed in this town, if you run red lights, if you run stops, you’re going to get dinged.”
While not the same as more officer enforcement, the town is hoping to have four automated speed enforcement (ASE) cameras installed sometime in March 2024, and has the option to add red-light cameras in future as well.
“Overall I think it went great,” Paul Dubniak, transportation technologist for the town, said after the meeting.
While he had hoped more residents would attend, he was pleased at how many council members showed up.
Based on the feedback, Dubniak felt staff had a good level of information to strengthen some existing components of the strategy and also look at new ideas, like controlling speeding on low-volume roads.
“The speed could be really high, so should that road then be tossed out because there’s not enough volume?” he asked. “Maybe ... rather than staff being able to say yes or no directly, this is going to go for discussion at the community and traffic safety committee. So there could be different evolutions of how this works.”
The strategy focuses heavily on quantitative metrics and seeing if streets meet certain thresholds for calming, but staff still plan to incorporate the more qualitative feedback from residents.
“It’s nice to go out and understand where someone’s coming from,” Dubniak said.
“It might be that their kid needs to cross the road, but they’re complaining about speeding,” he added.
Even if the data for that particular street doesn’t support speed mitigation, Dubniak said there could be other options that still help kids cross, like crosswalks or sidewalk improvements.
Staff plan to create the draft strategy in early 2024 and present it to the public for feedback at PIC No. 3 on March 6.
In the meantime, get more information or provide feedback to the town at townofbwg.com/tms.
