Traffic Calming: Not My Job Say Town Staff

No residents have been successful in three years in meeting all the town’s absurdly stringent requirements for investigation of the installation of even rudimentary traffic calming in their neighbourhoods. That’s what Peggy Slama, Collingwood’s director of public works, engineering and environmental services, told council last April.

According to the recent story in CwoodToday, “there hasn’t been any traffic calming approved through the process since it was started in 2021.” That’s three years during which the traffic has gotten worse, heavier, and faster, the pollution and noise have increased, and safety for pedestrians and cyclists has decreased. But, since residents haven’t the tools or equipment to prove it, no effort has been by the town made to do anything to alleviate the problems. Not my job…

Wait… what?

Since when has it been residents’ responsibility and not staff’s to prove a street or road needed something to reduce traffic speed and volume? Telling residents it’s “Not my job, it’s yours,” is not how staff are supposed to engage with residents. But, to be fair, it has been the town’s policy to treat residents this way since the former council approved that process a few years ago. It’s just another of Mayor Saunderson’s toxic legacies. An ethical council that actually cared about its residents would repeal it. But this council hasn’t.*

That resident-hostile policy was approved by the previous council’s Saundersonites in June, 2021. Back then, a CwoodToday story noted,

A new policy passed at Collingwood council on Monday night has set out a new set of steps residents must take if they’d like the town to consider investigating implementing traffic calming in local neighbourhoods.

Ah, there’s the problem: following the lead of Mayor Saunderson, the former council didn’t want to do their job so they sloughed off their responsibility onto staff. (Taking responsibility was anathema to the previous council.) The Saundersonites made it the responsibility of residents to prove they have a problem, not staff’s responsibility to respond to complaints and investigate. Serve the public? Hell, no: the Saundersonites made residents shoulder the burden. Let them eat cake… as Saunderson would say.

And even if a resident wanted to take on the task, council created an arduous, eight-step process they have to slog through before they can even present their request to staff to consider. That includes “data collection to study traffic volume, collision records, pedestrian activity, and site-specific information.” How many residents have that capability and the necessary equipment? Just to make their life harder…

But wait: they also have to create “a preliminary design that would be reviewed by emergency services, transit, and town operations for review and comment.”**

If those requirements are met, staff will then conduct a speed survey.

When the policy was presented to council, the only non-Saundersonite on council, the soon-to-be-bullied-out-of-office-by-the-rest, Tina Comi, commented that she “took issue with part of the policy that a formal request including a petition with 51 per cent of resident signatures be the first step to requesting traffic calming measures for any neighbourhood.” Good point: the requirement puts the onus on residents to deal with neighbours and get signatures on a petition before anything else can get done.

“What will it be like to be the single person on a street to go door-to-door saying that you have a problem and you can’t solve it unless 51 per cent of your neighbours agree and to put your face to that? We don’t even require that when reporting bylaw matters,” said Comi. “Here, we’re singling somebody out.”

Who decides what constitutes 51 percent? Do you count every house on the street? or just on the block? Or multiple blocks? Do you count intersecting streets (traffic isn’t merely linear, after all)? If so, for how far along those side streets do they count houses? What about the thousands of part-time residents who may not be in their vacation homes all the time? Since people work, shop, take their kids to school, go on holidays… trying to get all those signatures can take weeks of door-knocking.

And even if a resident managed to get all the necessary signatures, in true Kafkaesque form, town staff could still say no, without even having to leave their office to look for themselves.

Of course, the anti-resident Saundersonites last term opposed her. Coun. Jeffrey, ever the Saunderson lackey, commented in the Orwellian newspeak we so often hear from council:

I think, through this policy, we’re trying to be consistent yet flexible in trying to respond to each street and its demographics. We have to start somewhere. I’m very happy to start with (this).

As CwoodToday noted: “Council voted in favour of implementing the traffic calming policy by a vote of 8-1 with Comi voting against.” The Saundersonites also gave the director of public works the authority to “accept or reject” those resident-created requests. So a single staff person — not the elected representatives whose role it is to hear citizen concerns— could decide for or against what residents wanted without even bringing those concerns to council.

That’s the sort of let-them-eat-cake bullshit the Saundersonites did throughout their term. Which may be why so few were re-elected this term.

This term, CwoodToday tells us, our forward-thinking council was far more responsive to the public’s concerns (yes, that’s sarcasm…):

In 2022, due to complaints from the public on the arduous nature of the process, council voted through some small changes to the policy.

Right: after a lot of badgering from the public over the onerous policy, council made token changes that had absolutely no effect. And the story continues to tell us how f*cking little these changes meant:

According to the memo, in 2023, five petitions requesting traffic calming were received by the town, (Raglan Street, Connor Avenue, Fifth Street, Minnesota Street and Pine Street) and all were deemed not eligible following the speed survey. In 2021, one petition was received for Second St., but was also deemed not eligible, and a petition was initiated in 2022 for Stanley St., but was not listed in Slama’s most recent report covering 2023 numbers.

So basically, residents should f*ck off and just live with the problem. You’re not eligible for consideration. Cars are more important than your concerns. Safety? Pollution? Noise? Speeding? Live with them.***

A councillor who actually cared about the residents and not just their taxpayer-supplied salary and perks would raise the issue and demand to repeal or change this policy. They would ask the residents to come in and make their request in public. They would investigate the problems themselves, and make the increasing traffic problems throughout our town an issue for discussion at the table. They would champion the residents and advocate for safer, quieter, less polluted, and slower streets. If only there was such a person at the table… maybe next term.

Collingwood deserves better.

Notes:

* Let’s not forget which of our current council members were among the Saundersonites who agreed to this resident-hostile policy last term: Hamlin, Doherty, and Jeffrey. Can we expect them to behave any differently this term? Act like they care about our residents? Can a leopard change its spots?

** It’s not clear from the CwoodToday story when or even if staff get involved to help residents or themselves do any of these tasks; it appears from the story that all eight steps are a necessary part of the process for residents alone to complete. It is possible that this is not entirely correct and it’s merely sloppy local reporting.

*** Residents in the west side of town, especially along Third Street, have been calling for a four-way stop at Cedar and Third for at least two decades. The town has so far refused to install one, despite the very visible (and audible) increase in traffic and traffic speeds along Third Street, which is being used as an alternative to First Street by many drivers passing through town. Yet no traffic calming is planned to alleviate this and instead plans are in the work to make it a speedway like Sixth Street. Of course, townhall has a very pro-vehicle planning attitude, right out of the 1950s, so are you surprised? Me, either.

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