Transportation Educational Meeting MinutesDavis Islands Neighborhood Plan Task Force Marjorie Park Tennis Courts Meeting Room Summary of Presentation Debbie Herrington, City Traffic Engineer, spoke to the Task Force and interested residents on “Traffic Calming” options. She explained that she was in a very small section called traffic calming which has been in existence for about three years. The section is in the Traffic Engineering Department and Transportation Division of the Department of public works, which is made up of an engineering 3 position, which is presently vacant and frozen. There is a Tech 3 position, which is being filled by a person who is doing a wonderful job of filling everyone else’s shoes plus permitting. Debbie said that she was helping out because they were so short staffed but these people were trying to respond to the needs of the whole city of Tampa in trying to implement traffic calming projects. They are getting about $250,000 per year as a budget with other monies for the implementing of traffic calming projects. The projects that have been implemented so far are: Speed Tables have been put in at three different locations in Tampa and they are currently doing “after” studies on to see what type of impact they’ve had. Speed Tables were explained to mean that they were a little different than speed “humps”. Speed humps have a parabolic type of shape where the speed table is the same type thing but it has a flat top. There is a six-foot ramp up and then you go to a 10-foot flat top then down six foot. So the overall dimensions of the table is 22 feet. The good thing about speed “tables” vs. “humps” is that traffic can travel 25 miles an hour over the tables. The fire department test drove the tables and they gave their blessing to them on local streets and residential collectors. They did not want them on collector streets or major arterials as they did not want to have to protect the person in the back of the ambulance from injury in going over a speed hump they literally had to come to a complete stop to keep from doing so. Because of the critical time frames they deal with fire or a person with a critical condition on the way to the hospital seconds count. This is why the City no longer installs speed humps. They have installed speed tables on Pearl, which is down in South Tampa between Dale Mabry and Westshore. This is the first street that could be a direct cut over to Westshore. They did a study on the speeds there that came out to be in the 85th percentile, which is close to 45 miles per hour and that is a local residential street like we live on. The 85th percentile is how the department determines if some place has a speeding problem. If someone has an 85th percentile speed of 45, that means that 85% of the people on that street are driving 45 mph or less and 15% of the people are going faster than 45. This was considered a very severe problem and was on the top of their list of speed enforcement for many years. They tried different sized tables, one being 31/2 inch tables and another one of 4-inch. The 4-inch is believed to be the height the city will use in the future. Tables have also been installed on Himes and Franklin Streets. They’ve also been installed on Kirby that runs from Armenia over to Rome. A lot of elderly people were concerned about the slowing of emergency vehicles but since the initial expression of concern the city has not received any negative feedback. The City hopes that when they do the studies on these streets that they will see speed reduction and possibly volume reduction. They are planning to use speed tables in only severe speeding locations. Debbie showed us an 8-page list of locations with documented speeding problems. They are working off that list from the worst case down. A question was asked if they were basing the severity by using the speed trailers. She responded by saying that the police department had two trailers with radar guns that determines the car’s speed and the flashes the speed limit. They did not use that method. They use a radar gun they have four of them. They ask the citizens what hour would it be best to document the most traffic in an area and document the number of vehicles as well as speed within 1 hour. The other method they use is traffic counters with a speed collection. This is done in a 24-hour period. They have found that with either method they get the exact same results. There is perceived speeding and real speeding. The list she has contains real speeding on it. Some of the other things they’ve done in addition to the speed tables is a bulb-out at Rome and Morrison. This location by Hyde Park Village met a 4-way stop warrant but they didn’t install 4-way stop because Rome is very wide and signs would not be easily seen. Another calming device they are working on is closing a street up in the north by Chamberlain High School. The cut through street is El Porto and in working with the neighborhood group up there they had considered one-way streets as there were more people cutting through in a South bound direction instead of a north bound direction. They have worked on putting up barricades and put out counters in other streets to see that the problem wasn’t moved from the street in question to another parallel street. They did find that traffic was reduced on that street but was increased on another. They are on the second phase and will do a study after the permanent closure and if the problem still exists they will use a diagonal diverter. A diagonal diverter is where the cars are coming down the street and you get to a thinner section the cars on the right will have to go to the right and the cars to the left will have to go to the right. This solves the cut-through problem but chops up a neighborhood and is not good for the neighborhood. The City tries to work with the least restrictive things first like a one-way street but those things don’t work then we try diverters and things like that. On Davis Islands one of the things we are working on is that they have had a request to consider a 4-way stop down in the Business area at Biscayne and E. Davis and Barbados and E. Davis. They have also received a recent complaint about sight obstruction at the bulb-outs that they had installed at those street intersections, which is a good example of traffic calming that they did in that location. There has not been any speed studies done in the business area since that has been done in 1998. They have done some speed studies just to the North of the business district one block north of it and the speeds were 35 so based on that it does not have a severe speeding problem. The City can do another study in the Business area and she would assume that the speeds in the business area will be even slower than that. The for the 4-way stops the street to the north does not meet a 4-way stop warrant. Neither does the street to the south however, (Meeting the warrant: look at volume going into the intersection, accidents and basically there is a manual traffic control guide that is a federal guideline and the City of Tampa has adopted it). Biscayne is a lot closer to meeting the stop-warrant. They are studying that one a little more detail but is not quite there. They are looking into if a 4-way stop was put there, how it would impact the parking backing out into the business area. The question was asked had there been any incidents in Tampa where an intersection did not meet the warrant but was put in anyway? Debbie answered that prior to her coming there were 4-way stops that had been put in but she couldn’t find that the warrants had been met. To her knowledge, there hasn’t been anything that has come in that hasn’t met the warrants. In the manual, it is stated that you cannot use stop signs for speeding that is not the purpose of stop signs. The stop sign is to give the other person, the through movement you’re going to stop the least amount of traffic to get the most people through the intersection. Probably their number one request is just put stop signs up and the speeding problem will go away. The studies that have been done on places where a stop sign had been improperly placed and it was found that within a hundred feet of the passing the stop sign, the cars were back up to speed if they even stopped. From the study by the consultant, most people just “yielded” through the thing which is of course very dangerous for the child when you say ok Johnny go up to the stop sign and cross the street there and he sees this car coming and the car is not going to stop. So she has tried to stick to the manual on stop signs in the last 13 years and in the last three years using traffic calming methods to restrict speeding. The question was asked if the pedestrians had the right of way when crossing in a marked pedestrian crossing area. One of the criteria in the warrants for a 4-way stop is the number of pedestrians. The trouble with people crossing the street in a business district, they have found that most of the people cross in the middle of the block and not at the intersections. Another request that has been made is that we put in marked cross walks at that intersection. Debbie elicited the people present’s opinion because if they do that it will have to go onto the nice brick. It won’t look that great. She suggested that we could put one stripe on the transition concrete between the brick and the curb but another stripe will have to go across. The question was asked about the disabled ramps going onto the bricks to cross and had there been any comments about that. She answered no. A comment from the audience was that at Chesapeake and Bosporus, there is a 4-way stop. But the size of the stop signs was different in that one side (Bosporus, north & South) was 4 feet wide and the other (Chesapeake, east & west) were smaller than the other. Is this just temporary or is it permanent? Debbie answered that the city didn’t usually go with the larger size but rather started out with a 30-inch size, so if they went in with a 48-inch size there must have been a bad accident there. It was agreed that at the hospital there was also a large stop sign as there had been a number of accidents there. Debbie doubted that they could “backwards” on the stop sign sizes. A resident there asked for a safe way to cross the streets, as she is legally blind. She stated that she could try to cross the street with “two” canes and cars would not stop for her. She stated that we needed to find a solution so that she and others like her can cross a street on Davis Islands safely. Debbie said that she would do a speed study in the business area and see how they compare to the block to the north. It was suggested by a resident that they might look at the sound mechanism for crossing. Debbie stated that she didn’t believe that they had been certified by the State of Florida yet and that there were some problems with when it goes off there has been some confusion of which way the pedestrians walk. Tampa has been very active in agreeing to be a test site with some things that the state is trying out. It was asked if the pedestrian in a crosswalk have the right-of-way to cars? Debbie answered that if you haven’t started across yet, the pedestrian yields to the car. As to legally, the police would have to be asked the question. She noted that downtown the police have been giving out many tickets to cars not stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks. She indicated that in California, a pedestrian has the right-of-way over cars but she is not sure of the legality here in Florida. It was stated that there probably won’t have a speeding issue when
the study is done in the business village but the question is when is a
study done such as we have more pedestrians than cars which is the case
in the evening in the village center? Pedestrians should get priority,
are there any studies like that? A participant questioned if a median could be put in now? Debbie answered that with the bulb-outs there was not enough room for a median, they need to be about 6 or 8 feet wide and usually one or the other is done not both. Gene Boles commented that the problem is that for years the car was given preference in an area where it should be basically a pedestrian area. You don’t want to take the cars out because they had found over and over again that they eventually would be put back in. It was asked if when the bridge needs to be renovated or replaced could it be brought back to the standards of the original third Davis Islands Bridge that D.P. Davis installed? It wasn’t replaced with the same balustrade and it would be nice to use the same design. Debbie said yes, there is probably a way at upgrade time. The person responsible for bridges is Jim Burnsides he is in roadway designs. The person responsible for streetlight is Manny Masseur. His number is 274-8514. It was asked if there was an organization chart of the transportation department? Debbie said yes but it wasn’t on the website yet but the volume information for the all the functional and classified streets is on the website. It was questioned if we could call the department and have an organizational chart faxed to us and the answer was yes. It was asked if questions about stop signs would go to Debbie and she said yes. But there is liability concerns when you change signs because if there is an accident you are in court with a lawyer. At this time, the presentation ended as Debbie had to leave. As an addendum: Traffic discussion continued among the Task Force Members: Terry Cullen expressed that there were a lot of regulations out there and its not clear as to which ones can be flexed and which ones are very rigid. The study circles on Transportation will have to have a clear understanding of that so that when an option is presented we can say we can do this but we can’t do that. It surprised Terry to learn that you cannot lower the speed limit and yet you can spend thousands of dollars in travel calming to get the same effect. They are also bound by a lot of other rules in the State and Federal laws. It’s going to be important that we stay in close communication. The question was asked about overlay district rules in that shopping centers are presently bound by “surburban” rules of parking must be on the business site as opposed to on street parking but if the village wanted to renovate the buildings, they would be forced to abide by that rule. However, if we created an overlay district, we could say no we wanted to have the other and we can do that. Terry stated that we could flex local government rules by not state and federal rules. It was suggested that we might designate that the village area is the location the collector roads are taking you so you are there. You’ve now been collected and you are there and the speed can be lowered. Everyone got a laugh out of that. It was stated that it had been asked of Debbie if these rules and guidelines were written down and she said no, so if they are not written down, then they are not written in stone. It was asked of Gene Boles as to who designates the roads. He answered that in theory they are designated first at plan level but there is something called “functional classification” that traffic engineers use which has to do with existing conditions. So you could have a road today that should be classified as a arterial collector but it is not so it is a bit of a mixed. Traffic engineers are driven largely by standards that are created largely at state level. And they are driven to following those standards largely to avoid liability and to achieve a objectives that are largely automobile driven. There are a lot of contradiction and the key is when you make a recommendation you must make in a planned way with the documentation. We present it with the documentation and say we are applying this rule. There are hundreds of commercial areas around the country that are slowing their cars down and changing a variety of concepts and there are standards that are available even the standards that they are using. So when you say what you want to do, you say we are using this set of standards. It was asked if we could go to the state and ask them to give us their list of rules? Gene said we didn’t want to do that. This would be getting into an area which is extraordinarily complex and you’d be getting into the realm of engineers and you could read the rules and you think you know what it says and the engineer would interpret it differently. Gene suggested that rather than look at the overall rules, we go and find out what we want to do then go and find the guideline that you use. Terry said that there are a lot of techniques that are used out there and he wanted to make sure that she was able to come back and talk to the Transportation study circle. At first, start off to see if you can work within the existing guidelines before we charge off thinking we need to change the law and the whole world. There may be creative ways to achieve what we are trying to do. The only reason the idea of getting hold of the state laws is to be able to say to the city when told that we couldn’t do something because it was a state law that we could say no, no, no… it’s not a state thing. And we can prove it because we have the paper, obviously not that easy? No it is not. A lot of the stuff is administrative policy and interpretation, some this is harder to overcome that this is a law and this is not a law. Because that would mean that they would have to change their policies and interpretations as they’ve been doing it for several years and that’s really fighting an uphill battle. So he recommended looking at the issues we have and try to work within the guidelines that exist and what options they have to offer. Another item Terry covered was if the community found a way to pay for something they really wanted, referring to the Chamber offering to pay for the historic signage, we first would have to know what you can do and what you can’t do. If for example, if you want to something in the downtown area but you aren’t very high on the “needs” list of the City, we can offer to pay for it and get bumped up on the list. Gene spoke up in defense of the City and other organizations like it, they have to work pretty hard in trying to standardize things such as traffic control so we all know what the rules are. One of the biggest problems they have is when everybody is doing something different. And you have to pretty careful about that and the reason they will resist that is the worst nightmare for them is that every neighborhood has a whole different set of signs. It’s not just the problem of control but how do you maintain them? Do you make 45 types of signs? It’s a nightmare so we have to look at if it’s important enough to us for getting it done. It is understandable that the city cannot be that responsive to an individual’s desires. The real question is to what extent they will allow neighborhoods to handle they own “whatever it is” something esthetic or something like signage but you have to not only pay for it but be willing to replace it if it gets knocked down. He recalled a neighborhood he was working with in Missouri that wanted to have decorative lighting and the utility company told them that they would have to provide a stock for the company of the lighting bulbs an so forth so that they could come out and replace them when they had to do that. Think about that because that’s the sort of thing you get into. So you must think about maintaining the items that are different from the rest of the city. Both Terry and Gene are in agreement on deciding what we want to do then we look at the way it can be done within the existing framework but then you have a solid foundation for what you want to do. That is much more productive than trying to understand the morass of rules and regulations. Terry suggested that he sees that from the study circles he could see that we would come up with a number of different options. And when we go to the community-wide meeting we could ask the people that live and work here for their reaction to them. We would explain that this would cost this much and we could justify this etc. It’s like a search and discover mission of finding out what things would likely work given the local conditions. The chair asked Terry if he wanted to explain the transportation map he had brought. The map was a functional classification map of all the streets in the city and the county is functionally classified. The streets that are not on the map are designated as local streets. Essentially there are three divisions: Arterial, Collector and local. Arterial there is major and minor. It is based on what the function of that road is. He said that Charner’s idea of changing the designation of the downtown road is very creative but all of Davis Blvd, East, South and West are green on the map and that is designated as a “collector”. What its function is that it collects traffic from all the little side roads and channels it off the Islands. Think of it as the blood vessel and the arteries. Then that goes into larger roads as into a collector system. Look at Dale Mabry and the freeways, those are “major” roads those are the roads that have the most traffic and they take you around the region to the arteries around neighborhoods which then go to the local roads within the neighborhoods. The MPO, the Metropolitan Planning Organization, designates for the whole county then each jurisdiction adopts that and they can add some variations to it. It was asked if we wanted to change the classification of a road, how would we go about it. Terry answered that he was not sure how we would go about it. Charner suggested this because she said the two blocks of the business district truly do “function” differently than the rest of the collector, in that you have parallel parking and nowhere else on the Islands do we have this. If you look at a it as destination point and you could designate it as something where we could lower the speed limit. A question was posed as to how the fire station would view that, as all the emergency stations are located on collector roads. Charner answered that she didn’t think it would be a problem in that when the emergency vehicles are responding to calls, they don’t need to stay within the “speed limit” anyway. Gene Boles repeated what he thought he heard Charner say that we want to recognize the village for what it is and begin to pull some guidelines in to address the purpose and bring in some speeds that are compatible with that regardless of what the roadway is designated as. He said that he doesn’t think that we should be thinking of the reclassification of the street but rather the function of that area. He didn’t hear that we couldn’t change the speed limit but rather it would have to be posted. Terry corrected that Debbie had stated that it was a state law that collectors had to be 30 mph. Gene thought that that was not entirely right and that it might be but he thought that it might be a standard that is in the manual. Because I know of other areas in the State of Florida that is doing just this kind of thing and I can’t believe that the State is absolutely blocking that but we’ll go back and try to find out. It was suggested that even if we posted it at 25 mph nothing was going to happen. People will not slow down until they are forced to do so. Jeffery suggested that there were some options for the village that will help to get the area to where we want it to be. He suggested that they would look at it in the Study Circle and he stated that in talking to a number of people, he said that the classification map will be sprinkled all over where there are issues about speeding. Such as West Davis and Riviera and there are places on this Islands that you could land a helicopter in the middle of the road. It’s just so huge where the two streets merge it just tells the motorists to put-the-pedal-to-the-metal. There are ways we can calm that area too with medians, one-way roadways. We just need to priorities them all and make a list and we will get there. Gene Boles announced that at a recent workshop up in Tallahassee, Rick Hall who is a traffic engineer provided ten factors for workability and he would get the list. Low speed is a very high factor. Gene said that volume is one of the factors but it is not nearly ranked as high as speed. He repeated that the highest capacity is achieve at 25 mph. It was noted that as speed increases, capacity increases up to a point then it comes down again. The actuality is that we actually get lower capacity as the speed increases because we get further and further apart. So the highest capacity is at 25 mph, which is remarkably consistence with walkability and safety. There has been for the last 10 years a conflict between planners and traffic engineers about how you do these things. And the reason for this is that the traffic engineering manuals sited this and so there is a lot of data and support for the kinds of things you’re talking about that is counter to what you hear from traffic people. Charner asked about the comment Debbie made about real speed vs. perceived speed and wondered if we were on that list anywhere? Jeffery answered that we have a good amount of perceived speed because when you’re walking along and car comes by it’s a foreign object that you’re trying to avoid. Jeffery stated that this whole plan is going to have to be dissected into each area of the neighborhood say like Riviera and Lodoga and Lucerne and each one will have to come up an put up some money if they want it because the City is not going to give it to us. Jeffery explained that even if it is a perceived speed a calming devise would be effective. Say the local streets allow 35 mph. They don’t want them to go 35. There are people on Lucerne that put out traffic cones out on the street so the children can play roller hockey with parents out there that will speak to people in cars that come by too fast. He thinks that each neighborhood gets strong enough and motivated enough they can say yeah, we want them going 15 mph through here and hell with the rules… you know I live here! We want to have the fire truck come in but we don’t want people driving 30 mph down my street. Charner asked Jeffery is there more problems than we know about? Jeffery answered that everybody knows their area of the neighborhood better than anybody else and we will capture this in the Study Circle. Like I was surprised that where Rivera joins West Davis some people can’t get out because of the traffic, I didn’t know that. Often, Gene said that often things that slow traffic down are subtle. On his street which is 24 feet wide you can park on one side and not on the other because you would block the street. Traffic just hates that and they will complaint about safety but he defies anyone to find an accident. This is the same thing with plants and so forth if the street is too wide. For a long time traffic engineers required street to be something like 30 feet wide and that allows cars to park on both sides of two moving lanes. And that’s improper for a residential street. It does not slow the traffic down. Traffic calming has a lot of techniques besides street humps. Narrowing the streets, creating a funnel so they have to come down to one lane… there are a whole bunch of things that work wonderfully on local streets, turn-a-bouts, etc. They do the same thing if you park a car on the street. Closing a street should be a last resort because then you lose traffic capacity. Lee stated that she had seen the downtown of Ft. Lauderdale where they had put a park in the center of the street with diagonal parking against the curbs. She also stated that people cross the street anywhere and there are no cross hatches any where for pedestrian crossing. Gene commented that that was exactly what it was suppose to do. And he said that even though people are crossing between parked cars there its still safe because it works when the traffic is slowed. Gene told us the all across the country people had closed their streets to cars then put them back on because they realized that the cars were needed. It was commented that this was happening downtown Tampa in that Franklin had been closed to traffic and now it was being opened again to cars. Gene said that the car can’t dominate there must be a congenial mix. There are a lot of solutions to this and sometimes the solutions are very simple. Charner said that St. Petersburg is a good example of pedestrian friendly streets. Rose commented that when she was living at the apartments at Adalia that a lot of people were putting signs of no parking in front of their houses and in reality parking of cars on the street would slow the traffic down. Judi Barrett commented that a number of homeowners around the church area complained of cars parking when the church had activities. Then the church communicated with the homeowners an are now putting out traffic cones when they have a meeting and it has help a lot and she commended them for that. With this the discussion of Transportation issues ended and the Task Force went into their administrative meeting discussing the upcoming study circles. This is put on a separate document as minutes. Submitted by Lee Medart, Chair |
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