After spending more than a year recording thousands of vehicles routinely breaking the speed limit, a group of Charlottesville citizens has helped persuade area lawmakers to introduce legislation that could make enforcement of speeding laws on certain streets and roads around the state coldly efficient.
Concerns about traffic and public safety have persisted for decades, but complaints about inefficient traffic-calming measures and limited police enforcement in some places led the City Council last fall to adopt a legislative wish list that includes a proposal to allow localities to install automated speed enforcement cameras in school zones, residential districts and highway work zones
“We can only have so many police officers monitoring speed,” said Del. David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville. “At some point, it becomes an inefficient use of resources. If we can find a different way to enforce our speeding laws without using officers, it might make more economic sense.”
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Toscano and Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, have introduced identical bills that would allow localities to acquire speed-monitoring cameras. If caught on the cameras going 10 mph or more in excess of a posted speed limit, motorists could be hit with a fine up to $50.
Aside from law enforcement, measures have been taken to try to prevent motorists from speeding on roads such as Locust Avenue, Old Lynchburg Road and Rugby Road. Those measures have included implementing $200 minimum fines for speeding on certain streets and narrowing lanes in some areas.
After monitoring several streets for more than a year, however, Paul Reynolds, a University of Virginia professor emeritus of computer science and Locust Avenue resident, has concluded that those measures haven’t stopped many drivers from speeding.
“Traffic calming has been an abysmal failure,” Reynolds said.
In 2015, Reynolds developed software — which is available for free at github.com under “VideoSpeedTracker” — that, with a properly equipped video camera, can track how fast vehicles are moving through a narrow frame.
Using his homebrewed measuring system, Reynolds — whose 40 years of professional experience includes working on tracking technologies with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army and the Air Force — found in the first few months that about 85 percent of motorists drove faster than the posted 25 mph speed limit on Locust Avenue.
After the city instituted a few safety measures last summer to calm speeding motorists on Locust Avenue, Reynolds revealed this fall that more drivers started to comply with the speed limit, but only for a few days before the numbers rolled back.
While some may believe that driving only slightly faster than a posted speed limit is a mild offense that’s essentially permissible, Reynolds said driving more than 10 mph over the typical speed limit on residential streets poses a serious threat to pedestrians.
“People don’t realize that if you’re going 35 mph instead of 25 mph, you’ve tripled your chances of killing someone if you hit them,” Reynolds said, citing data from AAA.
Within months of Reynolds sharing his observations and software with city officials and neighbors, Councilor Bob Fenwick connected him with Jeanne and Phil Chase, a couple who has lived on Old Lynchburg Road since the late ’70s.
The Chase family is among a few households in town that have placed a camera on their house and have been providing footage and data to Reynolds.
“The idea for incorporating a camera in our lives is because we’ve lived on this very busy street which has become almost like a training ground for the Indianapolis 500,” said Jeanne Chase. “The traffic-calming measures they’ve put on the street are not working effectively.”
“We have enough people going 10 miles or higher than the posted speed limit — that gives cause to worry,” she said.
In the approximately 40 years the couple has lived along the street, they said they’ve also seen speeding cars and inattentive motorists veering off the road into people’s yards, causing property damage. Worse, Jeanne Chase said she’s seen several people injured in automobile wrecks involving pedestrians. She pointed to one such incident in which a child died after being hit by a car on Old Lynchburg Road.
“It makes you real sensitive,” she said. “If all of these things have occurred on this road over the years, why do we want it to continue? We don’t want people injured. We don’t want another person killed. We don’t want more property damage.”
“I really don’t want to call 911 again because we have another traffic fatality involving a vehicle. That’s just not a good thing. I’ve witnessed too much of that and I really don’t want to see that again,” she said.
Both Reynolds and Chase said the issue seems to have certain causes and effects.
Chase said the speeding problem along Old Lynchburg Road is exacerbated by the number of residential developments that are going up nearby in Albemarle County.
“You’ve got to realize that human nature of individuals, they seek the shortest distance between two points to get them to where they want to go,” Chase said, speculating that motorists in that area use residential roads such as Old Lynchburg to access the university area.
In the northern section of the city, right near the U.S. 250 Bypass, Reynolds said a recent study by the Virginia Department of Transportation on how children get to school found that only 15 percent of students at Burnley-Moran Elementary walk there despite the fact that 70 percent of its 366 students live within a mile of the school.
“That’s a measure the city hasn’t applied” when analyzing data to determine what speeds are safe, Reynolds said. “How many residents have withdrawn from using their streets in a reasonable way?”
Earlier this year, a traffic engineer with the city recommended that the speed limit on Locust Avenue be raised to 30 mph because it’s connected to the U.S. 250 Bypass, which has a speed limit of 35 mph, and because most vehicles on Locust travel at about 30 mph.
That recommendation, which was briefly posted on a city webpage in September, eventually was taken down. City officials have since maintained they have no intention to raise the speed limit on the road.
“There is no proposal on the table to increase the speed limit on Locust Avenue,” said Alex Ikefuna, director of the city’s Neighborhood Development Services department.
Despite including a request for the area’s legislators to sponsor the bills in this year’s General Assembly session, the City Council is divided on the idea of allowing speed cameras, which would function in a manner similar to red-light cameras.
In November, Mayor Mike Signer said the speed cameras could make enforcement of those laws too robotic, and expressed concern that there could be a “moral hazard” in collecting revenue from the citations that are issued when motorists are caught speeding.
Councilor Kristin Szakos shared similar concerns, saying those penalties could disproportionately affect low-income drivers.
Fenwick and Councilor Wes Bellamy supported the idea of at least asking Toscano and Deeds to propose the bills.
Councilor Kathy Galvin, however, said she would fully support the measure.
“I really find we’re at a crisis moment right now because of the callousness of people in their cars who have no clue these are dangerous, dangerous weapons,” she said in November about speeding cars. “We have to do something.”
Toscano said it’s hard to predict the likelihood of the bill passing, but said he feels good that Reynolds, Chase and other residents have been able to provide evidence to support the measure.
“In this case, we have technical data to back the proposal,” Toscano said. “It’s not just simply hoping we can do a better job monitoring speed. We actually have evidence of how this equipment would work.”
The bill also could see a boost from law enforcement officials who support the measure, Toscano said.
“At this time, we are interested in seeking the enabling legislation for speed cameras so that in the future we can research whether they are an appropriate enforcement tool for residential areas and school zones in the city of Charlottesville,” city police spokesman Lt. Steve Upman said.
Col. Thierry G. Dupuis, Chesterfield County’s police chief and president of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, said the association supports the bill.
“The VACP supports legislation which would enhance safety efforts in higher-risk areas, as outlined by the proposed legislation,” he said.
Chris Suarez is a reporter for The Daily Progress. Contact him at (434) 978-7274, csuarez@dailyprogress.com or @Suarez_CM on Twitter.