| Ryan Feyre
rfeyre@thereminder.com
Category:
NORTHAMPTON — During its meeting on May 16, the Transportation and Parking Commission submitted a positive recommendation for an ordinance to reduce the city’s statutory speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour.
Background
After kicking around for several years, Northampton City Council President Jim Nash and Ward 5 Councilor Alex Jarrett presented an order during April 13’s City Council meeting that would lower the default speed limit in Northampton from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour in thickly settled residential or business districts where a speed regulation has not already been posted.
The default speed limit is also otherwise known as the statutory speed limit.
According to Nash, the order has been kicking around within municipal government since 2016, when then-Mayor David Narkewicz suggested that Northampton could explore the possibility of reducing the default speed limit like Boston did at the time.
Nash and then-Councilor Ryan O’Donnell introduced the idea in 2017 and the council referred it to its committee on Legislative Matters and the Transportation & Parking Commission. Legislative Matters sent it back with a neutral recommendation, but the TPC eventually tabled it.
Back in January 2022, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation launched its “Safe Speeds initiative” to help communities work to slow traffic and prevent serious crashes.
Data from the MassDOT Safe Speeds initiative states that 73% of pedestrians will die when struck by a vehicle traveling at 40 miles per hour, 40% will die when the vehicle is traveling at 30 miles per hour, and only 13% when the vehicle is traveling 20 miles per hour.
Typically, cities and towns cannot lower an official speed limit without first conducting a traffic study for each street, then seeking approval from MassDOT. The entire process can be costly and cumbersome.
Statutory speed limits are different, however, in that they are not officially posted speed limits. Instead, the de facto speed limit in these areas, most of which are thickly settled residential and business districts, is 30 miles per hour. Unlike posted speed limits, cities and towns can reduce the statutory speed limit to 25 miles per hour.
Thickly settled neighborhoods are considered places where residences have an average density of 200 feet or less.
“There are a lot of residential streets where [30 miles per hour] is way too fast,” Jarrett said, in an interview with Reminder Publishing in October 2022. “It’s one of the top issues, the traffic calming, because people drive too fast.”
According to the order, since 2016, 65 communities, including Chicopee, Greenfield, Holyoke and Springfield, have reduced their statutory speed limit to 25 miles per hour on a citywide, townwide or street-by-street basis.
“I think there’s a lot of benefits, even other than safety, to reducing speed,” Jarrett said. “I see this as one piece a broad long-term plan to reduce speeds and increase safety throughout the city,”
The TPC meeting
While most people on the TPC were supportive of the change in statutory speed limits, some city officials and TPC members raised concerns about possible confusion about which streets would be impacted by this change.
“It is very confusing to understand which streets would fall under this classification,” said Carolyn Misch, the city’s planning director. “I think at the very least there should be maps of which streets this would immediately affect.”
The majority of the city officials and TPC agreed that an education component in some capacity would have to accompany this new ordinance if it were to pass, but determining the necessary resources for that is something the city will decide at a later date.
According to Donna LaScaleia, the director of public works, many of these streets in question are dead-end streets, less than a quarter mile long, while others have cul-de-sacs.
“There are comments that need to be made to that end; to what streets does this actually apply, how do we communicate that out to folks, and what are the expectations going to be for signage at the city limits, and how will the signage at the city limits interplay with the existing signage at the city limits,” LaScaleia said.
Aside from the education and communication component, Police Chief Jody Kasper expressed some concern that people on these streets will demand more supervision and enforcement in these areas when the police force is already strapped with other preoccupations in the city.
“I’ve seen some of the streets that are going to be involved [and] they are not streets that come to mind to me that have significant speeding issues or collisions,” Kasper said. “I love slowing people down…but I do just worry about if this passes, the impact it will have on this commission and what people’s expectations are, and our potential inability to meet those expectations.”
With the TPC sending a positive recommendation, the Committee on Legislative Matters will now deliberate on the matter before it goes back to the full council.