Martha Road resident claims lines aren’t working; data says otherwise
Martha Road, with traffic lines.
A Martha Road resident remains unconvinced that stripes the city recently painted on the street are slowing traffic. Ken Jarboe implored the city council last week to install speed bumps on the road, after showing council video taken from his doorbell camera.
Jarboe claimed cars shown in the video were going well above the speed limit. He claimed it takes a car going 25 mph about 4.5 seconds to go through the field of view of his doorbell camera.
He claimed his doorbell videos showed people going faster than the speed limit, some as much as 55-60 mph.
City police do concede that some people do speed down the street since the lines were put in late July. The highest speed recorded on a traffic box from July 30 to Aug. 11 was 43 mph.
But the average speed in that time frame was way below the speed limit — just 15 mph. The 50th percentile speed was 16 mph and the 80th percentile was 22 mph.
Of the 5,746 drivers recorded going down the road, the number above the speed limit was 295 — or about 5%.
Det. Gary Denham, the officer who has headed up the effort to slow down speeders on Martha Road and other streets, notes police want to gather more data on adjacent streets to get a complete picture of traffic patterns.
Martha Road is a “short cut” of sorts for people going to the Western Building Center truss plant and to Super 1 Foods from the south end of town.
Jarboe remained unconvinced the city couldn’t do more sooner. He claimed that speed bumps, which he has asked for on several occasions, cost about $216. The city has said previously a municipal speed bump would run about $7,500.
Police have beefed up patrols on Martha Road as well, though have yet stop anyone speeding on the road.
City council has opened the door to eventually putting speed bumps on Martha Road, but not until
other avenues have been exhausted.
Ideally, the city would like to see landowners agree to a special improvement district to install curbs and sidewalks on the street, which is about four feet wider than a typical city street.
The sidewalks would not only narrow the street, they would get bicycles, children and pedestrians out of the road, making the entire neighborhood, which is almost all rental properties, safer.
The city will purse the idea of the special improvement district in the coming months.