Agenda - Public Works Committee - 04/21/2009

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2.2.1 St. Paul City Engineer Major elements that derived from this interview, and subsequent Task Force meetings, include: St. Paul, as a core,. inner city, is completely defll'led as urban district. . St. Paul city ofncialsand engineeru1g staff are proponents of an urbandistrict25 !vIPHstatutory speed lilnit. The City of St. Paul has about 900 m,ifes of street, of which about700 are r.esidential, neighborhood..t:ype streets. The aavocacy for 2S NIPH comes from residential areaSj there is no simila.r advocacyfl'ombttsinessareas,~"Much of the support for a25 l\i!PH speed limit comes from groups outside of the traffic engineering profession '(e.g., new urbanist planners, transit andhicyclistadvocates). Speaking on behalf of other city departments,' the St. Paul engineer stated that of traffic-related complaints received from citizens, the most frequent one is excessive speed in residential areas. St. Paul has conducted a significant number of speed studies on residential streets in neighborhoods and the 85th percentile speed, across multiple studies, tendsto be very close to 25 rvIPH. St. Paul staff believes that the 25 MPH 85th percentile speed that is recorded in the City shows that drivers believe that 25 is the reasonable speed on residential streets in the city. The City Engineer further stated that the8Sth percentile speed should be used as the basis for setting the speed limit, citing TRB Special Report 254 (1998), "Managing Speed: Review of Current Practices for Setting and Enforcing Speed Limits," as a sOUrce for that direction. St. Paul has not experienced high numbers of vehic1e-:pedestrian crash events in residential areas. Pedestrian crashes tend to occur along or crossing arterial streets. , The current practice of the City of St. Paul is to not sign statutory speed limits unless requested to do so by police to aid in enforcement. However, the city does sign transition zones such as in a change from a 35 IvIPH zone to a 3 0 IvIPH area. 2.2.2 Andover City Engineer The Andover city engineer was interviewed, as this city represents a completely different characteristic from St. Paul relative to statutory speed limits. TI1emajor issue of concern in Andover is that several residential areas have house spacings that are greater than the 100-foot interval stipulated in the urban district defmition. Had these neighborhoods been located within a township rather than within a city, they would be categorized as "rural residential district" and would carry a statutory speed limit of 30 MPH. To any observer of residential development, these areas in Andover would ciearlybe seen as "residential." However, from a statutory speed limit point of view, these neighborhoods fall into a logical void; current Minnesota statutes do not properly address this situation. The roads in these developments carry the statutory speed limit of 55 MPR. It should be noted that although the absolute speed limit is 55 1vlPH, the current statute also has a provision that all drivers should operate their vehicles at a "reasonable and prudent" speed for these conditions. Page 6 33