I have traffic calming islands on my street in Raleigh. Does nothing but turn the street into a slalom racing street. One of those islands are in front of my home and wiped out all the parking on both sides of it. When family comes over they have to park around the corner. Speeding continues including school buses and the Fedex truck.

After looking at a map your right jdew. If you don't like traffic don't buy a house on such a road.

You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality. -Ayn Rand

Rainwater Road is classified by the City as a collector street. It was designed by the city to be a collector street and it is doing an excellent job. After all is said and done, Rainwater Road will continue to be a collector street. The last thing in the world that the City needs is to muck up an efficient collector street.

I would like to suggest to everyone that thinks traffic calming is the 'perfect' solution, that they drive over to Mourning Dove Drive and see the final product of the City's effort on their collector street. Our councilman told us that Mourning Dove Drive was an 'abomination' and that Rainwater Road would not look like Mourning Dove Drive. Well, the City wants to use the same traffic calming devices on Rainwater as they used on Mourning Dove ... so why should be believe that the results will be any different?

Raleigh, correct Mourning Dove ... and then come back to Rainwater. I bet the Mourning Dove residents would appreciate your efforts.

Why can't the speeder's be given speeding tickets? Isn't this problem supposed to be addressed by city law enforcement?

Yes, a 17 died in my front yard. She died because of on undeveloped mind of a teenage driver with a .29 blood alcohol content. I called 911. I stuck my head and body into the burning car and found the dead girl inside. I used my garden hose to put the fire out before it consummed her lifeless body.

I asked the policemen that were still on the scene the next morning if this accident could have been prevented by any of the devices currently being used by the City to 'calm' traffic. They all indicated that this was an alcohol related death, and that nothing but better thinking by an inexperienced teenager could have prevented it.

Everybody needs to understand that the concrete and asphalt devices proposed by the City are not going to prevent alcohol related accidents.

I have live on Rainwater Road for over 19 years and I can assure everyone that this was not typical. The other six accidents have all been simple fender benders with absolutely no one getting hurt.

Let's talk about preceived speeding on Rainwater Road. For 8 days in November the Raleigh Police Department monitored the traffic on Rainwater Road using two speed monitoring boxes, one for outbound traffic and one form inbound traffic. The average speed of the 5,352 outbound vehicles was 30.2 MPH. The average speed of the 7,786 inbound vehicles was 31.2 MPH. The speed limit on Rainwater Road is 30 MPH. I do not think we have a speed problem on Rainwater Road.

After the city drafted its plan for Rainwater Road several neighbors circulated a petition against the proposal at the recommendation of our councilman. Our councilman said that we live in a democracy and if we did not want the city to install traffic calming that we needed to get a majority of the residents to sign our petition. Our petition was signed by a majority of the residents and was submitted to the City as we were instructed to do by our councilman.

Yes, I am the grumpy old man, and I did not need to lie.

"a number of drivers seem to take pride in going over them at normal speed"

What exactly is the problem with going over the speed humps at normal speed? They're supposed to be designed so that you can go over them at the speed limit. Admittedly, the contractors Raleigh uses to put in speed humps can't seem to figure out how to make them uniform, so you can go 40mph over some and have to slow down to 15mph for others, but so many times I've seen people treat these like the speed bumps in parking lots and roll over them at 2mph.

"Where ISN'T speeding a problem?"

Where speed limits aren't set artificially low. Speed limits should be set at the point that 85% of traffic would flow if left to its own devices. There will always be speeders; there will always be slowpokes. I'm not saying this is case on Rainwater...not sure I've ever been on the street. But on freeways and highways, 85 percentile is the ideal level.

if i could hit a speed bump at the speed limit and not lose my teeth I may not mind the things, but they don't work that way.

I'm with localyokel. Four cop cars tagging everyone that comes through there for a week or two should solve all budget crisis and slow people down.

Police could calm traffic across the city if they just did their jobs.

page 1 | 2
<prev	next>

sort order: oldest first | newest first