Wide streets and fast cars

By Doug Page | Friday, September 7, 2007, 05:27 PM

Pleasant View residents have fought for two months against a bridge that would connect them to another neighborhood — worried about an increase in speeding traffic through their neighborhood.

The city said the bridge, which has been planned since the neighborhood was platted in 1993, is necessary to provide a second entrance to the area for emergency vehicles.

This week, John Knauer, a neighborhood spokesman, told the City Council that 97 percent of the residents do not want the bridge.

“You would be creating another Stonyridge Avenue” that would attract speeding traffic through the neighborhood, he said.

Stonyridge is a 41-foot-wide street that runs from East Staunton Road to North Market, serving several thousand residences in the city’s northeast neighborhoods.

The proposed connection between the Pleasant View and Southview neighborhoods would be between 30- and 35-feet wide, connecting South Market and Peters Road. The road would serve roughly 180 residences.

A review of police department records for the 18 months between January 2006 and the end of June 2007 showed that 14 speeding tickets had been issues on Stonyridge — less than one a month. That number is comparable to similar width city streets.

Andrew Rodney, a regional planner for the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission, said one way to slow traffic is to narrow roads. He said it was likely drivers would drive faster on a 41-foot roadway than on a 30- or 35-foot one.

“On a 30-foot roadway with parking on both sides, that leaves about a eight-foot travel lane. People would have to slow down or pull over for oncoming traffic,” he said.

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