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More speed humps could be coming to Davenport's residential streets

A year after installing speed humps on 31st and 32nd streets, the Davenport city engineer says speeds dropped roughly 30%.

DAVENPORT, Iowa — A year after installing 10 speed humps on 31st and 32nd streets from Eastern to Belle avenues in Davenport, the City is calling the pilot project a success.

The project was intended to reduce vehicle speeds and cut-through traffic on the two streets with a 25 mph speed limit. The City spent a year studying traffic patterns after installing the speed humps and found that speeds dropped by about 30%.

On 31st Street from Eastern Avenue to Spring Street, the average speed before the speed humps was 27.4 mph, but now it's 19.4 mph; a nearly 30% drop. The maximum speed registered before was 55 mph and has since measured at 35 mph for a 36% drop. Traffic volume didn't decrease as much. Before the speed bumps, that portion of the street saw 1,468 cars per day, but after only dropped to 1,414 cars.

"We also saw that some of the folks that were speeding through the area did choose a different path around it," City engineer Brian Schadt said.

He added that snow plows were not impacted by the addition of the speed humps.

Jason Haubenstricker has lived on 31st Street since 2017. He said you could often hear traffic speeding down the street and, occasionally, you do still hear a car hit the speed hump going too fast, but overall it's been better.

"It is kind of a cut-through to get to HyVee and Walgreens around the corner here and avoid a lot of the Kimberley lights and traffic, so it's always been a busy, busy street," Haubenstricker said. "After the speed bumps, it definitely made it a little easier to get in and out of our driveway... so it's slowed traffic down a little bit, but still definitely see a heavy flow of traffic through the street."

Neighbor Cynthia Huffman has also noticed a difference.

"I think the people most impacted were the people on the corners in particular because cars came around that corner fast and that catches everybody off guard," she said. "By the time they got to my house, it wasn't quite as fast, but it definitely slows people down. There's no doubt about it. It's a strange way to do it. We call it the Humpty Dumpty road, but it does seem to be effective."

It's why Davenport City Council is considering requesting a traffic calming policy. Schadt presented the traffic study findings from 31st and 32nd streets to the council Tuesday night and explained how other residential streets could be identified for speeding mitigation efforts, such as speed humps.

City engineering staff have developed a scoring system to evaluate each street based on traffic volume, tracking drivers' speed, its distance from a school or park and whether it's a cut-through street, among other factors. A street would have to have a minimum of 20 points for traffic calming measures to be installed. It's also recommended that the street's vehicle traffic would be between 500-5,000 vehicles per day.

"What we look for is we want our through traffic to really stay to the collectors and arterials (typically higher capacity roads with posted speed limits 35-55 mph)," Schadt said. "We don't want to see speeding or excessive volume of traffic within neighborhoods. We want to keep everyone safe."

If directed by the council, Schadt said the next step is for city engineering staff to draft a traffic calming policy to be presented to the council in the winter for approval.

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