Cold Lake – Council will not be introducing further traffic calming measures to Lakeshore Drive after a speed study prompted by a concerned resident showed that drivers were, by and large, following the posted speed appropriately.

“We know that speeding along residential streets can be a very emotionally charged subject for people, and we want to ensure that residents’ concerns and complaints are heard and taken seriously,” Mayor Bob Mattice said. “We thank residents for bringing their concerns forward and we thank our administration for looking into them and taking them seriously. In this case, Council decided that no change was warranted at this time, but we learned valuable information along the way.”

After hearing from a resident about significant speeding concerns along Lakeshore Drive, with a posted speed limit of 30 km/h, and that Lakeshore Drive is being used as a drag strip, administration began to gather facts to better understand the situation on the ground. City staff installed several speed cameras at four locations along road to measure and record vehicle speeds over a period of time.

The recorded data found that the 85th-percentile speed along the roadway was 37km/h. The average speed was 29.5km/h. The 85th percentile speed is the speed at which 85 per cent of the drivers are travelling at or below. Only 15 per cent of drivers would have been travelling at speeds greater than the 85th percentile. The 85th percentile speed is often used by planners and traffic engineers when designing road systems and assessing vehicle speeds.

The data was collected for two weeks, with four individual instances of extreme speeds recorded: Vehicles were recorded travelling at 90km/h, 88 km/h, 74 km/h and 63 km/h, representing the four highest speeds recorded during the data collection, which was likely the same vehicle going through the four speed cameras.

Chief administrative officer, Kevin Nagoya, told council that the data showed that the vast majority of drivers were within acceptable speed ranges.

“While there are certainly instances of motorists travelling at unacceptable speeds, these were limited to a few instances with very limited frequency,” Nagoya said. “Outliers such as these are best handled through enforcement rather than permanent changes to the roadway’s infrastructure, unless there’s desire to lower the speed limits in the community to something like 40 km/h as a general speed limit, and/or 20km/h in restricted speed zones such as such Lakeshore Drive, parks, and playgrounds.”