EDMONTON – After nearly three hours of discussion Wednesday, a city committee has decided to put the brakes on making a decision on increasing the speed limit on Scona Road.
“It feels ridiculously slow, to be perfectly honest,” said motorist Cindy Benson of the current 50 kilometre per hour speed limit.
Ward 9 City Councillor Bryan Anderson is pushing to see the speed limit on Scona Road, between the low level bridge and Saskatchewan Drive, increased to 60 km/h.
Since being redesigned and widened three years ago, the stretch of Scona Road has the capacity to handle a 60 km/h limit, from an engineering standpoint. And according to recent traffic studies, the number of motorists clocked driving 50 km/hr or less is just 11 per cent.
“You’ve got a road that begs to be driven at 60 or perhaps even a little higher,” he said. “In my opinion, the speed limit of 50 is set well below the functional traffic speed.”
However, the road goes through a residential area and many who live in the surrounding neighbourhoods say increasing the speed limit will only encourage already speeding motorists to drive even faster south of Saskatchewan Drive.
“I just can’t see how it’s not going to be worse,” expressed Cheryl Trepanier.
“Raising the speed limit is just treating the symptom. And what really needs to happen is some traffic re-design on that road,” added Ross Goodine.
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Ward 8 City Councillor Ben Henderson agrees. He believes the work that was done three years ago addressed the traffic flow issues, but not the issues surrouding community safety.
“There’s fairly significant density in the area. And yet, we’ve done nothing to make them feel safe in their own neighbourhood,” he explained.
“The really frustrating thing is, if this is the kind of way we had thought about it, if this is the debate we had had three or four years ago, we wouldn’t be in this mess. We would have gotten it right in the first place,” Henderson added. “The perfect solution walked by us when we rebuilt the road without thinking about these questions.”
As for the speed limit, Henderson says keep it at 50 km/h.
“To raise the speed limit on that road right now is going to make a really bad situation even worse.”
After much debate Wednesday, the issue was pulled off the table. Instead, it will come to City Council next week.
“The decision was to force council to make a decision next week. There will be no community speakers allowed,” said Anderson.
With files from Fletcher Kent, Global News.
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