West Davis speed limit soars to 55 mph
WOODLAND — Over protests from police and their staff, Yolo County supervisors on Tuesday jacked up the speed limit of a half-mile stretch of Russell Boulevard leading into West Davis from 35 to 55 mph.
The board raised the speed limit on 14 roads dotted throughout the county. New studies sparked the changes by showing that most drivers are zooming down roads at a much faster pace than the law allows.
State law requires those limits, which are based on how 85 percent of drivers travel down a road, be changed to reflect the new data. For most roads, supervisors followed the state’s cue by approving 26 speed limits, which included reductions and unchanged limits.
However, they held off on increasing the limits on four county roads, despite their staff’s suggestion to raise the speed limit on Russell Boulevard from 35 mph to 45 mph.
“We should not make those changes,” said Supervisor Don Saylor of Davis, “for the safety of the drivers and of others.”
A half-dozen residents from neighborhoods surrounding that stretch of Russell pushed supervisors not to raise the limit and keep the signs unchanged. Students from two schools and worshippers from three churches travel and cross the road. Bicyclists use the corridor heavily.
“Raising the speed limit would be unwise and unsafe,” resident Bindhu Miller told the board.
By not taking action, however, the supervisors effectively raised the speed limit on Russell and three other roads to 55 mph. Since they didn’t establish the limit suggested by the data, those stretches of roads switch to the state’s default speed limit for county roads, which is 55 mph.
“If you don’t change those (speed limits),” said Woodland California Highway Patrol Cpt. Dale Cannon, “we can’t enforce the speed signs out there.
“It ties our hands.”
After the supervisors decided against taking Cannon’s advice, he said supervisors were putting officers in “a bad position.”
Any tickets an officer writes based on the posted speed limit won’t stand up in court because the county’s studies established a new speed limit, whether or not supervisors adopted it, he explained outside the board chambers.
“The speed limit signs — they don’t mean anything,” he added. “They’re meaningless.”
And if an officer were to pull over a driver based on the defunct speed limits, he’s on thin legal ice.
One, the ticket won’t fly in court. And let’s say, Cannon hypothesized, that an officer pulls a driver over who’s traveling 55 mph, 20 miles over the posted limit but within the new one, just to recommend that the driver slow down.
If the officer sees 10 pounds of heroin or a dead body in the back seat, he doesn’t have the legal justification needed to explain why he pulled the driver over in the first place.
“It just puts the officer in a bad position,” Cannon said.
County roads near cities aren’t the same as county roads in the backcountry, said Supervisor Duane Chamberlain, who represents the county’s rural areas. When you get close to a city, drivers have to navigate more cars, bicycles and pedestrians, even if those streets aren’t technically in a city’s limits.
“The whole situation changes,” he said.
There have been three accidents along the stretch of Russell Boulevard between the city limits and County Road 98 over the past five years, said Panos Kokkas, assistant director of the county’s Planning and Public Works Department. Two, however, happened at intersections because a driver failed to stop at a stop sign, not because of speed.
Supervisors passed a motion to study other options for the four roads, including traffic-calming measures like speed bumps, changing the state law and examining whether they can make that part of Russell Boulevard a 25 mph school zone.
Supervisor Mike McGowan warned residents the county probably won’t be able to curb drivers’ speed through expensive road projects.
“We just don’t have the funds to do it,” he said.
— Reach Jonathan Edwards at jedwards@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8052. Follow him on Twitter at @jon__edwards
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=97105
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Posted by Jonathan Edwards
on Oct 25 2011.
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I think that’s a pretty misleading headline but it unfortunately reflects the problematic mindset that the only way to deal with speed issues in on the enforcement side.
How is it misleading?
The only misleading part I can think of is that if someone refers to “West Davis”, to most, that would imply city limits. Otherwise, it’s not Davis. It appears the stretch of county road this speed limit affects is outside of Davis. But I’m sure the panic people felt when they read the headlines sold papers.
All anyone wants out of a newspaper is for them to be factual.
my 2 cents, You’re right that this stretch of road is not within the city limits. However, in many significant ways, these residents live in the community of Davis. They shop here; their kids go to school here; they go to church here; they recreate, eat and commune here.
My two cents: it’s more accurate/true to say they live in Davis than it is to say they, technically, live outside the city limits (which the story goes on to explain.)
But while they are shopping here, eating here, attending school and church here, they are not exposed to a higher speed limit because the speed limit in West Davis has changed.
I realize I’m being technical on this but, wouldn’t a more honest and representative headline be ” Speed Limits West of Davis Soar to 55 mph”? Just one extra word. Or is that not dramatic enough to grab a reader’s attention and get them to read your story?
Here’s the problem with the title, it implies that the result of the inaction is that the speed limit will go up. But that falls into the same trap that both the public works guy and the officers are falling into – that the only way to deal with this issue is to raise the speed limit rather than put mechanisms in place to reduce speeds and they don’t have to cost that much.
David, with the existence of the new county studies, the speed limit has already gone up, at least as I understood both Panos Kokkas and CHP Cpt. Dale Cannon.
Supervisors voted to look into ways of slowing down traffic like the “mechanisms” you mention. But in the meantime, the speed limit is 55 mph (instead of 45 mph), and officers can’t enforce anything at or below 55, no matter what the signs say.
Moreover, Supervisor Mike McGowan warned that building those mechanisms would cost money, money the county doesn’t have.
my 2 cents: I respect your opinion, but please don’t attribute motivations to why I wrote something. You don’t know me, at least as far as I know.
I’d have to look it up and I don’t fully trust my memory, but I believe the law is actually radar enforce the speed limit, because the whole idea of the law was to prevent speed traps where the law enforcement hide out with radar guns and enforce artificially reduced speed limits.
You lost me. I don’t see how the method of enforcement is relevant here.
Whether they have radar guns, aircraft or their eyeballs, police can’t cite someone who is going over the posted 35 mph, because it’s not actually the speed limit. They can’t even cite someone who’s going 55 mph, which is now the legal speed limit on that 1/2-mile stretch of road.
If you get traffic calming measures, that will slow the traffic down, but that’s a big if, according to McGowan. I don’t think anyone said traffic calming measures wouldn’t be effective. But until someone builds them and the county does another study, the speed limit is 55 mph, 10 mph higher than if supervisors had approved the staff’s recommendation.
That’s not my understanding of the law. The law applies only to radar or other electronic devices.
I looked it up from the council discussion, because I remember Landy Black making the comment at the Davis City Council meeting last year..
http://cityofdavis.org/meetings/councilpackets/20110315/05M%20Speed%20Limit%20Modification%20Pilot%20Program.pdf
“The California Vehicle Code and the California Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices govern the criteria for establishment of speed limits in local municipalities. Speed limits, when enforced by radar or other electronic devices, are subject to justification by an Engineering and Traffic Survey (E&TS) which is required at least once every five years to justify the posted
speed limits.”
Now if you tell me that only applies to cities, I stand corrected.
David, the passage you quote, as I understand it, means that if radar guns are one of the methods used to enforce the speed limit, they have to conduct the study to justify the speed limit.
But that law only necessitates the study; it doesn’t mean that once that study is completed and the speed limit is established that an officer can’t use other means of enforcing the speed limit.
But, again, that’s irrelevant, except that they use radar guns, so they needed to complete the study. The study’s already been done, and thus the speed limit’s been changed to reflect that data.
Earlier you said:
“Here’s the problem with the title, it implies that the result of the inaction is that the speed limit will go up.”
That’s not a problem at all. That *was* the result of the inaction. The speed limit at that 1/2-mile *is* now 55 mph.
And as I read the law, it simply precludes radar guns but does not make the speed limit 55, which was my initial objection.
Perhaps it’s not that law which is at play. I don’t know. What I do know is CHP Cpt. Dale Cannon and Panos Kokkas, Yolo County’s assistant director of Planning & Public Works, both say a state law, whether its the one tou reference or some other, makes the speed limit 55 mph after (1) the new study and (2) the board chose not to adopt the speed limit dictated by that study.
I feel the headline and article are clear on all of these points.
55 seems too fast for that stretch of road…not only because of the presence of the homes, schools and churches alongside it, but also because they and their driveways are often obscured by trees and shrubs. (Even when I ride through that area on the bike path, I take extra care.) All it takes is one careless child, cyclist, pet or driver for a tragedy to occur. I’ll probably still drive through there at a speed closer to 35, especially at night.
Duke, we appreciate your carefulness and hope others will emulate you. The reason the speed limit is 35 mph on that stretch is that in December, 1974 a seven-year-old boy was killed in that area by a driver going at 55 mph (which was the speed limit at the time). The child was waiting for the school bus, and may not have been paying attention to traffic at the time. The number of bicyclists and pedestrians, including many children, who daily cross that road has increased greatly, as has the number of people going in and out of Patwin Road. There should some legal way to keep the speed limit down for the safety of all involved. Hopefully the supervisors can come up with one.