In May, the Salt Lake City Council voted unanimously to lower speed limits in residential areas to 20 mph, affecting some 70% of all roads in the city.
According to Salt Lake City Council Chairman Dan Dugan and advocacy groups such as Sweet Streets SLC, the change will take some adjusting to for both drivers and law enforcement, as traffic police must navigate staff and equipment shortages amid enforcing the new speeds of the road.
While the new 20 mph signs are already up, Dugan said drivers still have time to adapt.
“We don’t have the officers to enforce it right now, but if you lower [the speed limits] people start to get the general feeling,” he said.
Speed limit changes in Salt Lake City come as part of a larger plan to improve pedestrian safety and city livability, and these changes didn’t arrive without extensive consideration.
In the United States, civil engineers typically set speed limits after conducting a road study. Engineers determine an 85th percentile speed, the speed at which approximately 85% of all vehicles on a stretch of road travel, factor in other elements and set a suggested limit, according to the United States Department of Transportation.
If a road has a high crash rate, the engineers may recommend a speed limit decrease. If the crash rate is high, and speeds are significantly higher than the current speed limit, engineers may recommend stronger speed limit enforcement.
According to the Utah Crash Summary, 2021 was the deadliest year on Utah roads since 2002 and the second consecutive year that crash-related fatalities have doubled percentage-wise in the state.
Speed limits, however, are only as powerful as the people who are willing to follow them.
“[Speed limits are] enforced … though traffic cars, radar and LIDAR (laser imaging, detection, and ranging), but not all [officers] have it,” said Jason Aposhian, a traffic officer in the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Holladay precinct. “We’ve got two cars with radar and LIDAR, and we do most of the speed enforcement.”
With such a low number of active speed enforcement units available, the challenges begin to mount for communities to enforce current and future speed limits, Aposhian said.
“It’s effective, I just wish there were more of us. Most of my day is spent issuing citations, be it speed, stop sign violations, red light violations,” he said. “If we were all equipped to run speed [deterrence] here in Holladay, we would have a better effect [against speeding].”
The largest issue with the recent speed limit changes, Aposhian said, are with enforcement and ensuring that drivers obey traffic laws.
“25 [mph] doesn’t really mean 25; 20 will not mean 20,” he said. “The majority of drivers do follow the speed limits. [For] the ones that don’t, 20 miles per hour [limits] aren’t going to change anything. They’re still going to be doing 35, they’re still going to be doing 40, no matter what the sign says.”
Sweet Streets, a traffic advocacy group, spearheads the Livable Streets program, which provides education on the planning, budgeting, implementation and operation of streets and public spaces.
With the goal of making streets safer for pedestrians, next steps from the Livable Streets program include adding raised crosswalks and smaller-scale roundabouts to reduce cross-neighborhood traffic, an effort Chairman Dugan said is referred to as “street calming.”
“The [available units] of police officers or anything of that nature were pretty much cost prohibitive and labor prohibitive,” Dugan said.
The city is also prohibited from using traffic monitoring cameras in residential and neighborhood areas, so “street calming” was the best idea presented to the city council, Dugan added.
“We have a big initiative to do street calming projects throughout the city, and that will take time,” he said. “We’re trying to institute that across the board.”
The project may be slow moving, Dugan said, but as it develops, he believes it will gain momentum as they begin instituting the changes in local areas before individual streets.
Drivers should be on the lookout for new speed limit signage on city-owned residential streets where the speed limit was previously 25 mph. Driver can read more about traffic calming initiative and file street calming requests through the city website.
