Guest Column: Why Costa Mesa Needs a Formal Traffic Calming Program

The following essay first appeared on the Goat Hill Rodeo, a blog dedicated to local Costa Mesa politics and happenings. Goat Hill Rodeo is written by Jenn Tanaka, one of our board members.

Concerns about speeding and aggressive driving, especially on residential streets, are some of the most common complaints I hear as a board member of CMABS. The scenario goes something like this: a resident approaches us stating that there is a serious problem with a local street. “It’s really dangerous to cross.” “Cars are drag racing at night.” “My kids can’t ride their bicycles because of all the cut-through traffic.”

And they aren’t wrong! Aggressive driving is way up. The resident then asks us what we can do about that problem. Unfortunately there usually are only two options we can give them: lobby for more police enforcement in the problem area, or change the design of the street to discourage unwanted driver behavior.

Using enforcement to control speeding and aggressive driving is harder than it sounds.

While enforcement seems easy and relatively inexpensive compared to pouring concrete, that impression is deceiving: we have less than ten sworn traffic cops at the moment, and every officer we divert to do traffic enforcement in a particular area is one less patrolling the streets for potential DUIs, car thefts and other significant motor vehicle crimes. With DUIs in particular up way above pre-pandemic levels, I personally would much rather see the CMPD stay on task rather than sit in residential neighborhoods with radar guns. Furthermore, enforcement is often a temporary fix: having an officer on site may reduce speeding or aggressive driving at first, but then as incidents drop, the need for enforcement becomes less pressing and the officer may be reassigned. Then the problem may re-emerge in the absence of visible police presence. Rinse and repeat.

So while enforcement has its place, most traffic professionals will tell you that engineering, rather than enforcement, is the key to managing speed and aggressive driving. But you don’t have to take the word of advocacy organizations like Strong Towns; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration itself asserts that “it is essential to have a comprehensive and coordinated, system-based approach to managing speed”. This “system-based approach” is referring to making changes in the physical roadway itself to control traffic speeds and to discourage aggressive driving.

But changing roadway design is challenging, too!

Sadly, when it comes to physically altering the roadway, there isn’t much residents (or even resident organizations like CMABS) can do, because no one allowed to touch our city streets without the approval of the Public Works Department. Remember when a concerned resident spraypainted a makeshift crosswalk near Wilson Park? Well, the City didn’t applaud someone taking initiative. Instead it viewed the crosswalk as an act of vandalism and sent crews to immediately remove it.

And look, I get it. The Public Works team feels like it has to stick to the “standard” — usually described in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) — for both practical and legal reasons. Obviously it would be awful if someone gets hurt because of a resident-led intervention. And the city could easily get sued and its federal funding threatened if installations in the right of way don’t conform to the MUTCD. But it’s still frustrating that, even when residents want to do something as simple as adding a crosswalk — even in a place the city already has plans to add one itself — they can’t.

Now, to its credit, Public Works has tried to respond to resident concerns by implementing some temporary “traffic calming” interventions itself by using inexpensive and simple materials like paint and plastic straw dividers. “Traffic calming” refers to the use of infrastructure to cause traffic to slow down or to shift to alternate routes. The most well known example might be speed bumps, but there are lots of other devices and approaches that are considered “traffic calming,” such as narrowed lanes, bulb outs (where the curb comes out into the street to narrow the roadway at the intersection), speed feedback signs, raised crosswalks, and even adding parallel parking.

But so far the approach by Public Works leaves something to be desired. First, there is no clear mechanism to nominate your street for traffic calming. Second, it’s pretty clear that Public Works only has the capacity to do one or two of these projects at a time. And third and most importantly, the City hasn’t publicly declared the purpose of these traffic calming exercises, leaving residents guessing as to why they were installed and how long they will be there.

But good news is that the city can address most of these problems.

Enter: the formal traffic calming program

Unsurprisingly Costa Mesa is not the only city wrestling with problems like speeding and cut-through traffic. But other cities have done a better job of addressing those problems, and many of them have done so by adopting formal traffic calming programs. Unlike the city’s current ad hoc approach, a formal program would provide a framework where residents could learn about possible solutions to their problems, and direct their concerns about their streets directly to Public Works, and monitor the progress of ongoing interventions. This would have a number of advantages:

A formal program can establish a clear, transparent process for selecting traffic calming projects. Many formal traffic calming programs, like the this one from Richmond, VA, allow residents to apply for traffic calming on their streets on the city website. This would make the process clearer and fairer as residents would no longer need to go through intermediaries like their City Council representative or advocacy groups like CMABS. Once gathered, these applications could then evaluated by Public Works against pre-disclosed, objective criteria, such as traffic volume, traffic speed, city needs (such as emergency vehicle routes), incident reports, etc. So in addition to establishing a clear line of communication between residents and Public Works, this approach would also help manage resident expectations. Not every problem can be addressed with traffic calming.

Additionally, a formal program make the type of traffic calming intervention selected predictable. Not every traffic calming device makes sense for every street. The City of Rochester, for example, discusses twenty two potential traffic calming devices, and uses a table to clearly indicate which device is best used for addressing congestion, speeding, aggressive driving, etc. By disclosing the particular strengths and weaknesses of various devices, residents can better understand why Public Works will select one treatment over another for their street.

While ad hoc interventions have to be evaluated holistically, which takes up a lot of staff time, traffic calming projects that are part of a formal program can set objective and subjective evaluation criteria that can be reported out for every project. Before and after speed and traffic volume studies are an absolute must, and the city should commit to gathering this data as part of the program. But the city should also provide due weight to resident’s subjective evaluations of the interventions. Making a street feel safer or more inviting should matter almost as much as whether it dropped average speeds by a few mph, since resident perception drives behavior.

Another transparency plus is that a formal program can establish clear timelines for intervention evaluation, testing, removal and permanent installation. Many cities open a window for resident traffic calming proposals to coincide with budget season, so that Public Works can determine its capital improvement funding requirements with these traffic calming projects in mind. But getting the timing right isn’t the only important consideration. If Public Works chooses to try a traffic calming intervention on a temporary basis, it needs to determine how long the intervention will last in advance and stick to that timeline. Otherwise, residents can be left scratching their heads when, months later, the “temporary” installations are starting to degrade and look like an unkempt construction site.

And best of all, this program can be set up with minimal capital investment, as most of it can be put in place merely by providing materials on the city’s website and drafting simple application forms.

But setting it up is the easy part. Maintaining it and really making it work for residents will require a bit more of a lift.

If the City Council is really serious about addressing residents’ concerns about their streets, they should fund and staff a traffic calming program within Public Works

And this is where I’m probably going to lose some folks, but please bear with me. Fundamentally, residents are clamoring for traffic calming (Council Member Arlis Reynolds said close to a majority of the complaints she hears from residents relate to unmet traffic calming needs) and we do not have sufficient Public Works staff to address all of them. So, given that it is budget season, let me pitch a simple solution: hire a traffic calming coordinator and at least one engineer devoted primarily to traffic calming. Yes, these would be additional heads on our organizational chart. But here’s why I think adding more staff in this case makes sense.

First, we have more budget than we have staff. This has been made evident over and over as we discuss the capital improvement program. So if we are going to hire more bodies, we definitely should be slotting them into Public Works. And hiring personnel dedicated to a clear resident need makes sense. Although each of these projects are small, they take up a lot of staff time, and that burden is magnified when it takes up the time of very senior staff like Jennifer Rosales or Raja Sethuraman. We need those heavy hitters working on big projects like Adams Avenue or Fairview Road or Tewinkle Park, rather than spending lots of time on these smaller projects. So hiring another senior level staff member and sufficient support staff would help take the burden off of them, especially if they were granted reasonable autonomy.

Second, folks in these roles could be flexibly assigned other upcoming areas of need. We are going to be rezoning large swaths of our commercial corridors to accommodate residential development; wouldn’t it make sense to have someone familiar with the needs of residential streets on staff to advise how to retrofit our commercial streets for more residential use? We are also embarking on a huge project in Fairview Developmental Center where we will be building a neighborhood from the ground up. I would think having staff that had a good grasp of what works in other areas of the city in terms of street design would help us get those details right the first time, rather than having to go back and do more work after speeding and aggressive driving become a problem there, too.

Third, residential traffic calming will help us build out our bicycle network much faster and more efficiently than focusing solely on adding bike lanes and separated cycletracks, which saves us money in the long run. In Melissa and Chris Bruntlett’s book Building the Cycling City, the authors point out that Amsterdam became the bicycling capital of the world not through adding bike lanes but by using traffic calming:

Looking at Amsterdam today, it would appear the 1978 policy equated to thousands of kilometres of bicycle-specific infrastructure, creating a seamless network across the entire city. But the truth is actually a little more complicated and counterintuitive.

“The story of Amsterdam is, in fact, one of traffic calming rather than bike lanes,” [Dr. Ruth] Oldenziel [co-author of the “Cycling Cities: The European Experience”)] insists. Rather than focus on building physically separated cycle tracks on every street (which was, in part, pursued; just not to the extent of other Dutch cities), officials applied speed limit reductions, parking restrictions, through traffic limitations, and lane narrowings and removals. This created conditions where the bicycle was the single most convenient and comfortable way to get from A to B.

Now, it is critically important to emphasize that Amsterdam residents wanted these interventions. But where Costa Mesa residents also want to give a calmer and quieter street a try, I think we should let them and decide for themselves if the vehicle speed tradeoffs are worth it. I bet living on a “bicycle” priority street isn’t so bad. I’d gladly have one on my street.

And fourth, if we don’t address problems like speeding and aggressive driving through engineering, we are going to end up addressing them even more expensively through enforcement or degradation of property values. Sworn officers are extremely expensive (it’s part of the reason we don’t have enough of them) and their time is even more so, as every cop pulled off active duty to man a radar gun hurts public safety elsewhere. And bad, busy and dangerous streets hurt property values just as surely as good streets will elevate them.

So in summary, I recognize that funding in this kind of program won’t be cheap. But I do think it would be a good investment that will tangibly and directly improve residents’ lives. And really, isn’t that what the money is for?