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Meadowlark Speed Humps Will Remain |
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Written by Jeff Radford
Corrales Comment
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Tuesday, 09 March 2010 |
The idea of ripping out the speed humps on upper West Meadowlark died without a fight.
Meadowlark residents turned out in force February 23 to oppose the plan
announced by Mayor Phil Gasteyer to remove the speed humps and
substitute speed monitoring “Slow Down!” signs.
A few spoke in favor of getting rid of the speed tables, but opponents
clearly had the upper hand. No one from the Village administration
defended the plan to seek a grant to pay for the project, and no
councillor supported it.
Councillor Sayre Gerhart said the proposal was “very upsetting,” and
Councillor Pat Clauser said she was “very dismayed” that the
proposal had been advanced.
After hearing mostly negative reaction from nearly a dozen homeowners,
Councillors John Alsobrook, Gerhart and Clauser urged the mayor
not to proceed with an attempt to gain a grant through the Mid-Region
Council of Governments to pay for the project.
“The speed tables are clearly doing the job they were meant to do,”
Alsobrook pointed out after introducing information on response times
for emergency vehicles driving over or around speed humps or other
“traffic calming” devices.
Gerhart was adamant in her opposition. “This is how we fall back into
bad habits the Village has had of chasing grant money without having
the planning done and following procedures.… This is chasing grant
money for the sake of chasing grant money. And it has gotten the
Village in trouble so many times before in the past.
“Over the past four years, I have tried to work very, very hard to put
in the planning and to invite the public into it, so we are moving
forward together in a way so that when we have a project that we have
defined and we’re all on the same page about it. Then we go to look for
the money for it,” Gerhart pointed out.
Maybe another opportunity will come along to apply for funds for
Meadowlark Lane, or maybe it won’t, she admitted. “But if this
[proposal] is being driven by a trails project, I’m a little bit
offended by the way this has happened.
“In starting the trails project, we met with the community, and
we made a promise as a council with this community that we would
include the community in these types of discussions about how we would
be planning for these trails.
“So when it comes back to me that we’re having these discussions about
these speed humps because of this being a trails project, it’s very
upsetting to me,” Gerhart said. “We established a process and made
promises to the community about how we were going to do this.”
Furthermore, the councillor added, “I represent the Village on the
[Council of Government’s] Metropolitan Transportation Board, but I
didn’t even know that we had an application before the board; I had to
read about it in the packet of materials. So there’s a total break down
in procedure within the Village administration and the council and the
public.
“This is not the way we need to be doing planning in the Village. It’s
not the way we manage our projects, and it’s not fair to anybody.”
Councillor Clauser said she is the alternate delegate to the
Metropolitan Transportation Board, and “I didn’t know that we had
applied for any funds either.”
Clauser said she sympathizes with upper Meadowlark residents who
live along a cut-through route between the first and fourth largest
cities in New Mexico. “I was very dismayed that there had been no
planning [for the speed table removal] that we all knew about.”
After the public testimony, some of it heated, and the strong
opposition from councillors, Mayor Gasteyer asked for a motion that the
Village Council direct the mayor to withdraw the grant application that
had been made to the Council of Governments.
Alsobrook made the motion, it was seconded by Clauser and all councillors present approved it.
Several villagers who spoke at the meeting were convinced that upper
Meadowlark is being used as a short-cut for vehicles leaving Rio Rancho
headed for Albuquerque. Bob Bryan, who said he lives in the oldest home
on Meadowlark, contended his road has become little more than a Highway
528 bypass.
One of the residents who lives east of Loma Larga, Luís
Benavidez, suggested a traffic circle for the Loma
Larga-Meadowlark intersection.
Pam and Danny Cox, at 1040 West Meadowlark, leaders in the effort to
impose traffic calming measures on their street, traced the history of
proposals and experiments there.
“Studies were done, traffic counts were taken and we in the
neighborhood worked with the Village to come up with a solution to calm
the traffic,” Pam Cox recalled. “We presented ideas such as
roundabouts, chicane, chokers, lateral shifts, center island,
narrowing, half-street closures, whole-street closures, diagonal
inverters and median barriers.
“But a stop sign was recommended by the Village Council, and it was
placed at the top of the hill. That was not something we agreed
with; the result was not good, and it was removed.
“When it was apparent that no other action was being taken, we took
action and gathered a petition requesting the speed humps. Those were
placed at recommended distances so that vehicles could not speed up
between bumps. We were told this would be the first step in calming
measures and that additional measures would be forthcoming.”
Nothing further was done, and then residents have learned the speed tables might be removed.
She warned that new apartments under construction in Rio Rancho between
Highway 528 and Meadowlark will surely increase traffic coming down
Meadowlark to Loma Larga.
Another Meadowlark resident said he had difficulty trying to pull onto
the road from his driveway because traffic is so steady. If the
Village does remove the speed humps, he warned, a police officer would
have to be assigned to Meadowlark around the clock to catch speeders.
As it is now, he said, he has to be careful when picking up his morning
newspaper thrown to the side of the road. “They don’t care. And if you
put bike paths there and take out the speed bumps, you’re putting
people who ride bikes in danger. Because some of those cars are going
40, 50 miles an hour. They do it now even with the bumps.
“Keep them in, please, I’m begging you.”
Another lower Meadowlark resident who fought for the speed humps years
ago, Roger Finzel, said he was aghast when he learned from reading
Corrales Comment that the Village planned to remove them. The
decision to put them in was preceded by “extensive discussions over
many months.”
It was presumptuous, Finzel said, to “ignore the fact that we had a
unanimous council that voted for those speed tables in the first
place. And now it looks like someone is stealthily planning to get rid
of them.
“It’s not right, and furthermore, it doesn’t make any sense.… common
sense tells me if you take the speed tables out, they are going to go
faster, especially coming down.”
Mike Roake and Michelle Anderson argued in favor of removing the speed
humps. Roake said the humps are a deterrent to rapid emergency
response, especially when equipment is called in from Rio Rancho fire
stations. “Speed bumps threaten public safety more than they help,” he
asserted.
Anderson referred to federal highway standards which state clearly that
speed humps should not be installed on collector roads such as
Meadowlark.
She pointed out that upper West Meadowlark has an exceptionally wide
right-of-way, 60 feet, that could be used for a variety of other
traffic calming measures instead of speed tables.
However, over the years abutting property owners have encroached on
that right-of-way with mailboxes and landscaping, so any alternative
traffic calming measures would have to be preceded by Village
enforcement to clear away impediments. |
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