Penticton City Hall has introduced a new Transportation Safety Policy, intended to both standardize the procedure for dealing with traffic concerns and reduce staff workload.
The policy will give city staff an opportunity to weed out frivolous complaints through an initial screening process, one element of which will be a petition form showing support from a substantial portion of the neighbourhood, in the case of a traffic calming request. Safety issues, like signage, signals or crosswalks, would be evaluated by staff, including referral to the RCMP and the city’s bylaw department.
Mayor Andrew Jakubeit was concerned with the amount of time that might be spent by staff gathering data and studying traffic in response to public concern. Mitch Moroziuk, the city’s director of operations, said staff already spend a lot of time dealing with a variety of traffic complaints and the new policy would allow city staff to quickly deal with unsupported concerns.
“Now if two people phoned and said we want a crosswalk, we wouldn’t do anything with it, because you don’t have enough people signing a petition to come forward and say they have an issue,” said Moroziuk. “This helps us. It screens out the items that there isn’t enough significant comments coming from the community. So we don’t deal with the one-off issues anymore, unless it is a real safety concern.”
Coun. Helena Konanz questioned whether the policy, which would require 40 per cent of the people in the area to fill out a questionnaire, with 60 per cent of those in favour, wasn’t setting too high a bar.
“Do you think that is a high number to have to get to be involved in the process?” asked Coun. Helena Konanz. “We didn’t even get that many people out to vote in the last few elections.”
Jules Hall, director of development services, said the amount of support required was consistent with what other communities have set, and would show commitment throughout the neighbourhood. Taken together, he explained, it amounted to about 24 per cent of the neighbourhood.
City engineer Ian Chapman concurred with his colleagues, saying the new policy would save a significant amount of staff time by streamlining the process of examining traffic concerns.
“This will give us a method of objectively, and in an organized fashion, to deal with these complaints. Right at the very first stage, they will be eliminated,” said Chapman.
Besides substantiating concerns and confirming they are broadly held, the new policy also stresses education by encouraging appropriate motorist, pedestrian and cyclist behaviour, as part of developing a calming or safety plan to deal with a concern.
“The nice thing about the policy is it really builds a case or a framework on whether to validate a neighbour’s assertion that it is a dangerous neighbourhood,” said Jakubeit.
Council voted unanimously to endorse the new policy.