John Whistler, director of the West End Residents Association, says that a 30 kilometre-per-hour speed limit in residential neighbourhoods would make the city safer.

Credit: Doug Shanks

Let’s slow it down, WERA says

It’s common knowledge that Vancouver motorists are able to drive approximately 10 kilometres over the speed limit without being ticketed. The West End Residents Association (WERA) is lobbying to include that actuality in a City proposal to lower the current 50 kilometres-per-hour speed limit on residential streets.

“The culture is that it’s okay to drive 10 km/h over the speed limit, as far as the police are going with tickets,” says WERA director John Whistler. “If the [speed limit] reduction is only to 40 km/h, then the effective speed limit is 50 km/h. So, with a reduction of the speed limit to 30 km/h, the effective speed limit is 40 km/h.”

Whistler and his colleagues at WERA are working to lower the currently proposed speed-limit reduction from 40 km/h to 30 km/h, which would bring speed limits on residential streets down to the same level as those around parks and schools. “One of our contentions is that the current 50 km/h speed limits are actually dangerous; there is no time of the day or night that it is safe to drive 50 km/h down these streets,” says Whistler.

The proposal for lowering the current 50 km/h limit originally appeared 11 years ago, when it was part of 1997’s Transportation Plan. Despite community interest and the support of two generations of Vancouver mayors and city councils, the proposal hasn’t budged from its original incarnation. “There’s a section in the [provincial] Motor Vehicle Act that needs to be changed in order for us to do it,” says Lisa Leblanc, of the City of Vancouver’s Greenways and Neighbourhood Transportation Branch. “It requires the Ministry of Transportation to get it through. There has been no effort taken by the provincial government on this, in spite of lobbying by City staff.”

Leblanc says City staff were hoping to see the speed-limit proposal go through a fall sitting on the B.C. legislature, but now it looks like it will be pushed back to the spring 2009 sitting, in time for the next provincial election. “The next move is really theirs,” says Leblanc.

Back on the side of municipal politics, Whistler is optimistic that WERA’s campaign to lower the residential speed limit to 30 km/h will meet with favourable support from both candidates in the race for the mayor’s chair. “I think both Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson will get on board. It’s a neighbourhood livability issue,” he says. “The community has to come before cars. People don’t speed in front of their own homes, and they understand why residential areas have lower speed limits. So, I think that most people will be very happy about this [30 km/h proposal].”

Whistler also hopes that a new, lower residential speed limit will encourage more dynamic use of public space. “Canada’s one of the few countries in the world where rollerblading and skateboarding is actually legal [on city streets]; in most cities it’s illegal. Vancouver’s a leader in alternative modes of transportation, and we want to encourage it. We hope that [a 30 km/h limit] will encourage people to see the streets as not just exclusively for cars.”

But Leblanc says a 10-kilometre rollback on the residential speed limit, to 40 km/h, is less likely to create public controversy. “The general feeling is 40 km/h is better than 50 km/h, and 40 km/h is less likely to cause significant resistance. It was seen as achievable without a lot of angst,” she says. “To have a blanket 30 km/h [speed limit] everywhere might not necessarily be appropriate, whereas taking traffic-calming measures in some areas of the city to make people drive 30 km/h could be achievable.”