During a Wednesday night work session, the Canby City Council and Canby Planning Commission talked about traffic and its impact on city and citizens.
Specifically, the group discussed traffic calming methods the city may look at in the not-too-distant future.
“We’ve long heard, particularly from neighborhood residents, about how to address a higher volume of traffic, speeding traffic and pedestrian safety issues,” said Canby Mayor Melody Thompson. “Cities do a lot of things in terms of traffic calming — some do simple things like speed bumps and signage. We initiated a study on this some time ago and staff has come forward with a draft program.
“We hope to put a process in place and address the
substantiated traffic issues — wherever they might be,” Thompson said.
The draft program has been approved in concept and several neighborhoods were represented at Wednesday’s meeting to provide input toward the final product.
From this point, the draft document will be presented to various neighborhoods for comments to get a sense of what they are thinking. According to Thompson, the document then will head back to the Planning Commission for revisions and public hearing, followed by review by the city council.
“The final draft could include anything from signs to speed bumps to speed tables (which have less of an incline and decline), or even a larger solution such as an engineering redesign of a road — as well as the price tags for all the options,” said Thompson.
Thompson said that city staff typically gets a wide array of complaints, ranging from simple speeding to road design.
“That’s one of the reasons we reached out to find a program,” she said. “We knew there were some available tools that could affect traffic and pedestrian safety. We want to have those tools available to deal with the issues we know are coming.
“This draft will cover the whole town and allows a conduit for things to flow through and for us to pick out,” Thompson added. “It’s really a tool belt for the city — what the right tool to address this (traffic) concerns.”