Cape Coral City Council supported a proposal to lower speed limits on neighborhood roadways to 25 mph Wednesday.<\/p>\n
City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn said most policies that come before the council have a defined outcome that is concrete.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we are discussing with you all is a risk management policy,\u201d he said. \u201cAt 40 mph you are at an almost always deadly accident, 30 miles per hour a 50\/50 chance and at 20 mph its almost survivable,\u201d he said. \u201cDo you want to reduce the risk in our community for the outcome should an accident happen?\u201d<\/p>\n
Principal Planner Laura Dodd said the areawide neighborhood roadway speed limit study provides a policy decision to reduce the likelihood of serious injury or death relating to speed on local roadways.<\/p>\n
The recommendation was to move the speed limit to 25 mph on areawide neighborhood roads, which received a unanimous consensus vote. <\/p>\n
Consensus votes are not binding, they are direction to staff. <\/p>\n
Consensus votes must come back to a regular council meeting to be approved.<\/p>\n
Council was presented with three options, each of which had a cost for new signage. <\/p>\n
The first option \u2014 citywide sign replacement, was $57,719; second option \u2014 neighborhood gateway, was $52,403; and the city gateway, the third option, was $49,038.<\/p>\n
The council chose option one which would replace 807 signs.<\/p>\n
Dodd said it boils down to two items \u2014 the effectiveness of speed limit adjustments and pedestrian vulnerability in residential areas. She said the most effective is enforcement and driver education programs.<\/p>\n
Pedestrian vulnerabilities are due to the city being a pre-platted community that lacks sidewalks, pedestrian infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been here before,\u201d Dodd said. \u201cThe last time it was presented in 2016, it did fail because it did not have support from PD because of enforcement concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said they do now have a memo of support from the Cape Coral Police Department for this program.<\/p>\n
As part of the analysis, there was an incident sampling, which Dodd said shows Cape Coral slightly lags to severity of crashes occurring, trending just below the state.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are slightly in a safer bubble as far as severity of crashes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Between 2020 through 2024 there were 506 local crashes.<\/p>\n
The residents of the city were invited to participate in an in-person workshop on Feb. 18, and an online community poll was available from February through April.<\/p>\n
Ian Rairden, with Kimley Horne, said they received 466 comments over a two-and-a-half-month period. Most of the comments highlighted major road speeding at 167, followed by the second highest of 94 for local road speeding.<\/p>\n
The maximum speed within a municipality is 30 mph and municipalities can set a maximum speed limit of 20 or 25 mph on local streets following an engineering analysis.<\/p>\n
Rairden said they collected speed data from 40 different points, which included all two-lane roadways with generally no sidewalks.<\/p>\n
The study looked at two different areas \u2014 85th\u00a0percentile speed \u2014 the speed in which 85 percent of vehicles travel at or under, and the 10-mph pace \u2014 buckets of speed \u2014 5-15 mph, 15-25 mph.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s study showed that the city-wide average for the 85th\u00a0percentile speed was 28.7, and the upper limit of 10-mph pace was 27.9.<\/p>\n