Agenda - Council - 05/12/2009 - Laserfiche WebLink

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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 defzned as urban district. St. Paul city officials and engineering staff are proponents. of an urban district 25 MPH statutory speed 1unit. The City of St. Paul leas about 900 miles of street, of which about 700 are residential, neighborhood-type streets. The advocacy for 25 MPH comes from residential areas; there is no similar advocacy from business areas.uMuch of the support fora 2S MPH speed limit comes from groups outside of the traffic engineering profession ~(e.g., new urbanist planners, transit and bicyclist advocates). Speaking on behalf of other city departments, the St. Paul engineer stated that of traffzc=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 8S~' percentile speed, across multiple studies, tends to be very close to 25 MPH. St. Paul staff believes that the 2S MPH 8S~' 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 the $S~' percentile speed should be used as the basis for setting the speed limit, citing 'T'RB 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 ofvehicle-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 3S MPH zone to a 30 MPH 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: The major 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 definition. 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 clearly.be seen as "residential." However, from a statutory speed limit point of view, these neighborhoods fall into a logical void; current 1Vliz~nesota statutes do not properly address this situation. The roads in these developments carry the statutory speed limit of 55 MPH. It should be noted that although the absolute speed limit is SS MPH, 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 -161-