City Wrestles With Speed Limits
By Monrovia Weekly
Published: Thursday, April 24th, 2008
Pasadena and other cities throughout the San Gabriel Valley continue to wrestle with the issue of setting speed limits, particularly in residential or mixed development areas.
In a scene mirrored in many other cities, the Pasadena City Council was presented with a recommendation to revise speed limits on 29 street segmented in the city, most of them increases.
Reacting to fury on the part of many neighbors and neighborhood associations, the recommendation was sent back for a second look by the city department of transportation and the Transportation Advisory Commission.
The number was reduced to ten increases and one decrease, but was again sent back by the council to research an issue about the city’s right to set limits on some streets in the 710 corridor controlled by the state.
The biggest issue when speed limits come up in any city is the limited control available at the local level. Pasadena and other cities have frequently called on legislators to change the law, revised to eliminate the problem of speed traps.
Cities with substantial pass-through traffic were at one time famous for setting artificially low speed limits with hopes of catching speeders and inflating the financial coffers of the city with fines.
Traffic fines are now a shared revenue, which lessens the incentive, and the state adopted rules regarding prima facie speed limits tied to prevailing speeds, as measured by traffic surveys. To discourage the use of local option on speed control, cities cannot use radar or laser enforcement of speeds on streets without a current traffic survey on file. Without those tools, police can only enforce by pacing drivers, which reduces the amount of enforcement.
Under vehicle code rules, the basic speed limit is 25 miles per hour in business and residential districts and school zones. On streets which are arterials or collectors, wider than 40 feet and with more than one lane in each direction, the speed is to be set at the closest 5 mile per hour increment to the speed at which 85 percent of the traffic is traveling.
State transportation officials maintain that speed limit signs do not slow down traffic or decrease accidents and increase safety, and raising a posted speed limit does not increases the overall speed of traffic.
Residents living on or near major streets are unimpressed with the logic, and have pressed for cities to adopt “traffic gentling” measures such as speed humps or bumps to slow down cars. Also popular now are electronic signs giving real speeds of approaching traffic.
The Pasadena streets facing possible speed limit increases include segments of Columbia Street, Glenarm, Hill Avenue, Mountain Street, Pasadena Avenue, Rivera, Rosemont, Villa and Washington Drive.
The sometimes variable success of the “red light cameras”, set to photograph red light running cars, has led some cities to experiment with the idea of cameras to catch speeders. The enforcement issues remain to be solved, however.
Meanwhile, as City Councils continued to be faced with the responsibility of setting the limits without real control over the process, the debate is likely to go on at the local level, and the pressure to continue to change the law.
By Charles Cooper
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