South Bend city engineers hope more speed humps will calm traffic and make neighborhood streets safer.
They announced Thursday that they’re installing 94 humps around the city. They started in May and have put in about half of the humps. They aim to have the rest in by November.
The city is using complaints, along with traffic, crash and speed data, to decide where to put the humps.
They’ve built a website where residents can monitor progress on the project. Southbendin.gov/trafficcalming. The site is rich in data, showing which parts of the city have had the most traffic complaints, usually over speed.
“One of the main concerns that we often hear from residents is neighborhood speeding,” said City Engineer Kara Boyles. “When we began to identify projects for this year’s project itself, we had more than 300 unique requests for traffic calming. So we know traffic calming is an issue across the entire city.”
The city spent more than $1.4 million on traffic calming measures last year, and about $800,000 so far this year. That’s far more than the previous seven years, when the city never spent more than $400,000 a year, and usually spent less than $200,000.
So do speed humps work? Boyles says research has shown they do in other cities. In South Bend, Boyles said she’s considering studying crash and speed data in the Harter Heights neighborhood south of the Notre Dame campus. Speed humps were installed there in Fall 2020.
Boyles noted that data could be skewed by the COVID-19 pandemic, since traffic dropped so dramatically during that time. But generally citywide, she wants to use data in coming years to evaluate the humps’ effectiveness.
