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

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4.0 DEVELOPING RECOMMENDED CHANGES TO SPEED LIMIT STATUTE TEXT Through the course of work by the Task Force, the members explored several options .and alternatives for establishing revisions to the speed lunit statutes. Many of these alternatives and discussions. centered on the question of "what is the proper statutory speed limit" and what might be a basis for changing it from its present value. A related question is whether the speed limit should vary for different Types of "lower speed" roadways. The group explored the issue of whether roadways could be differentiated so that "pure residential"streets could have a statutory 2S MPH limit while collectors, arterials and above could be set at a statutory 3Q MPH. No alternative was developed that would likely be acceptable to all stakeholders (e.g., citizens, politicians, enforcement, engineers, etc.). In partculax, the law enforcement community opposed having adual-level set of statutory speed limits within an Urban District (ar similarly defined) area. Similarly, discussions were held about setting statutory speed limits on some other basis (e.g., functional classification or geographic boundary such as within the seven-county metro area or within the Minneapolis/St. Paul urban core). However, this was found to go against the principle of uniformity. One of the important principles that the -Task Force supported is that speed limit setting should be uniform state-wide and should not -vary from ` . city to city or in different parts of the state. The work of the committee therefore focused on how to amend the speed limit statutes without creating a significant change in the approach to setting speed limits and without causing a complete overhaul of the speed limit statute text. 4.1 Urban District 4.1.1 Urban District Discussion Many factors were examined in considering what the appropriate statutory speed limit . should be in Minnesota for the Urban District or "low speed" roadways. Within the Task Force this essentially represented an analysis~of " 2S vs. 3Q" for the statutory limit. pne of the first issues to be considered was the engineering, or basic safety, element. A key point within the safety discussion is the concept of "survivability." Data were presented to the Task Force that depicted survival rates for pedestrians for vehicle/pedestrian crashes at varying speeds. It is intuitively clear that the higher the travel speed of the car, the more critical avehicle/pedestrian conflict would be. Thus, survivability rates decline as speeds increase. The graph shown in Figure 2-2 (Section 2 of the report) depicts the survival rates as a function of vehicle speed. t1. change in travel speed from 30 to 2S does cause an incremental change ixi survivability. However, given the limited number of pedestrian fatalities on low- speed roads in Minnesota; to obtain significant changes in survivability would require a decrease of travel speeds to 20 - or lower. It was further concluded that there would not possibly be overall support far a statutory speed linnit of 20 MPH nor compliance with this speed. Basing a decision on speed Limit solely on the issue of pedestrian survivability in a crash event would not yield an acceptable limit. Page 2Q -175-