After a few successes with slowing traffic and cutting the number of accidents on West Lowell Avenue and Summer Lane, to name just two hot spots in Tracy that won the attention of officials, the City Council enacted firmer rules last week about how people can get the city to take steps to control traffic. What tools the city will use to do that are also now codified.
What has been done so far — mostly a combination of traffic humps, white stripes on streets, stop signs and speed signs showing drivers how fast they’re going — has won praise from residents on streets that seemed a magnet for speeders.
Last week, the council voted to set aside $50,000 a year to slow drivers in neighborhoods where residents complain about traffic.
“We’re making progress,” said Mayor Brent Ives. “This is not the kind of thing that will ever really stop. You’re always just one abusive speeder away from a complaint.”
Complaints are what prompted the council to take matters into its own hands on a handful of streets where residents complained about maniacal drivers.
On Lincoln Avenue, the city painted stripes on the roadway and posted a couple of stop signs near an S curve in the road to put the kibosh on overeager drivers.
On West Lowell Avenue, Tracy spent about $30,000 to build speed humps in the road — a higher, though less jarring, version of speed bumps.
Summer Lane and Beverly Place got electronic speed-limit signs that tell drivers their speed.
City engineer Kuldeep Sharma and traffic engineer Ripon Bhatia say those measures cut the average speed of cars by 3 or 4 percent.
Lowell Avenue activist Edie Madruga said the speed humps there have slashed the number of accidents on the street.
“Half the problem is solved,” she said.
The other half would be to lessen the number of cars, trucks and school buses that crowd the street for most of the year, she said.
But that seems a problem beyond the bounds of what the city means to tackle.
What Tracy has done is set up steps to calm streets made dangerous by speeders.
The city won’t rush out and put up a stop sign at the initial inkling of trouble.
When someone complains, a traffic engineer looks at what can be done quickly to curb the problem and calls for reviews by various departments and the city’s Traffic Committee.
The first steps are the easy and cheap ones, such as mailing letters to nearby residents that ask drivers to be careful on the roads, putting up radar traffic trailers and speed limit signs, and having police ticket the area more heavily.
If that doesn’t work, the city ratchets up its efforts — assuming a street meets certain requirements regarding its width, the number of cars on the road (at least 800 a day), the speed limit (25 mph), and drivers’ average speed. The street must be residential, and 85 percent of the traffic must go 33 mph or faster.
If the road fails those tests, the city will take no action.
But if it passes those hurdles, the city will consider installing speed humps or solar-powered radar feedback signs.
But before it does that, 70 percent of area households must vote in favor of having the city take action.
Tracy is prepared to take even greater steps to build traffic circles, medians and other devices to slow traffic, though that requires not a poll of residents, some of whom may be renters, but a 70 percent vote of property owners, who would pay for the street changes.
The council debated it but decided to keep a 70 percent threshold for both of those votes. It rejected an idea proposed by Councilman Mike Maciel and Councilwoman Evelyn Tolbert to have residents share 50 percent of the cost of speed humps and radar signs.
Which neighborhood will be the next target to slow traffic remains to be seen.
Ives said he hears complaints about speeders on Eastlake Circle, the looping road in the Hidden Lake subdivision, but that’s partly because he lives there. He said there are no doubt plenty of other candidates around town.
“A lot of this is experimental in nature,” he said. “You almost have to try different things to make it all work.”
Here is a document showing traffic accidents prior to the speed humps and how the speed humps at W Lowell are working.
http://www.ci.tracy.ca.us/uploads/fckeditor/File/city_council/agendas/2009/09/01/handouts.pdf
Why? Because no one cared or was educated in traffic flow.
If you live in a neighborhood where people speed it is because they had to fight their way home inside the Tracy city limits. Can you blame them?
You really need to get a sense of humor
And I can't figure out what I said that made you think I would foot 1/2 the bill. If I was so inclined, and it was an issue where I live, I can guarantee you that I could save good money by subing the work out instead of letting the city do the negotiating.
The other side of this (and everyone knows I'm not much of politico lover) is that the city is shackled with all the lib laws that this wonderful state has endowed upon us that makes public works projects of any kind very expensive.
You should be able to call up a guy with a truck of asphalt and roller, 3 guys, one day and your done with 4 humps, maybe 10.
These officials in all aspects of our lives have created these additional costs. They are the problem. They make way too much money without figuring out the obvious.
Many of the colleges offer online classes and open enrollment which means you don't have to be there, sharp, at 9:30 AM.
For local school districts pushing the problem till 9:30 won't help either and I doubt Tracy Unified School District would let you approach them with this idea.
That does not solve the problem, have you ever driven down Greystone to Jill to Tennis lane, at 6:30 to 8:30? There are hundreds of cars up and down those streets, then cross Corral Hollow to other locations.
We must get all theses cars off the roads. Even those that go to Los Positas and to other colleges, tie up our freeways. As the college enrollments get larger it will be worse. The workers tax dollars to support the schools should come first. Now we have a new high School,and even that is not going to solve the problem. This is old business for me sorry.
I think TUSD has a schedule and some parents commute after dropping them off.
It would save the taxpayers a bundle? Are the puncture strips reusable?
Just change the commute times. Local traffic to schools should be after the commuters going to work.
From 5:00 am to 8:30 am is when the traffic is the worst. This is when 90% of the traffic comes from, parents driving children to schools. If we can set the school starting time forward an hour or so it would help. Example: instead of 7:30 am start school at 9:30.
The children will benefit from the hours, by getting more sleep. Just as it is in my court of 12 homes we have 21 children who are driven by their parents to different schools.
Would you be prepared to share 50% of the cost of $30k?
This guy drives through a light and notices a flash from the camera. He knows he wasn't speeding so he circles around and goes back through the light several mph below the speed limit. Again, the camera flashes. Now he's mad, and goes around the block for another drive through, this time well below the speed limit. Again, the flash. So he once more drives around the block and rolls through the light at 2 mph. Again the flash. All he can do is laugh and go home.
A week later he gets 4 tickets in the mail for not wearing his seatbelt.
My first thought when I read the article was to do the math. We are getting ripped off. What else is new. These people in the city aren't spending their own hard earned money. Otherwise they would find a way to do whatever they have to do in an economical fashion.
They continue to approve spending new monies like there is no tomorrow. It will only end when they have completely depleted the city savings. And then you better have one of those chains attached to your wallet.