By Joanna Steinmetz
A new trend cruising through Ottawa-Carleton has city and regional councillors and Lyon Street residents on one side of the road and emergency services on the other.
City and regional councils and the transportation committee agreed in September to the Lyon Street pilot project. It will see seven speed humps built on Lyon Street in November, one for every block from Somerset to Arlington avenues.
Speed humps are a part of traffic calming that attempts to slow traffic down to the legal speed limit. But fire, ambulance and police services are worried they too will be slowed down.
Richard Cantin, Regional Council representative on the 911 management board says he’s worried about a possible increase in response times.
“That concerns the emergency service because 911 has chopped a good 10 seconds off every call, in terms of dispatching the service, and this will take away that advantage that we paid $10 million for,” says Cantin.
Bruce Bursey, a Lyon Street resident and co-chair of the Centretown Traffic Calming Working Group, says emergency response times may increase from zero to six seconds per hump, but adds the benefits outweigh perceived costs.
For the past four years, the group has researched Centretown traffic and found the main problem is speeding.
The study found the average speed of 85 per cent of drivers was 13 kilometres an hour over the 50 kilometre limit.
He says speeding has always been a problem on Lyon.
“It’s usually after supper and late in the evening when these yahoos come down at 11 o’clock, 1 o’clock in the morning,” Bursey says.
“There’s no other cars on the road and they just speed to get on the Queensway and they’re going 70 to 80 kilometres an hour,” he says, adding speed humps are designed to deal with these people.
The humps are about six metres in length.
Coun. Cantin says drivers will take other streets to avoid the humps, which would just move the problem elsewhere.
“You’ve got a bunch of bleeding hearts, people that don’t realize that if you move into a property like Lyon Street, you have to expect there’s going to be traffic,” says Cantin.
“It’s not as if it happened yesterday — it’s been there since 1958 when the Queensway was built.”
Regional Coun. Diane Holmes says she has heard complaints about traffic for the past 20 years.
Speed humps are one of several pilot projects, and Holmes says they are really the only way to slow down traffic on Lyon Street.
She says information from other areas with speed humps suggests the number of accidents would be reduced and adds that this reduction is balanced against a few more seconds of response time.
In the next 10 years, Holmes says the region will test different traffic calming methods to gather data and see which ones work the best.
Doug Brousseau, deputy commissioner for transportation, says no one really knows the effects speed humps will have.
The 911 advisory committee, made up of representatives from emergency services, will keep records of response times and possible alternative routes.
A meeting will be held in a year to see the results of the pilot, but Brousseau says one year doesn’t make a trend and that more data will be needed before putting in long-term traffic calming devices.