City dawdles on fixing Great Northern 'rat run' up Blake Avenue

In the United Kingdom, they'd call it a rat run: a small residential street used by drivers to avoid rush-hour traffic on main roads.

Here in the Sault, Blake Avenue is the preferred route to bypass Great Northern Road gridlock between McNabb and Oryme, particularly for drivers wanting to avoid the stop lights at Wawanosh Avenue.

This past summer, Ward 4 Couns. Rick Niro and Marchy Bruni fought for traffic-calming measures on the side street, which runs parallel to Great Northern from the back of Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen to the new Quesada Burritos and Tacos.

The councillors argued that raring-to-go drivers have turned Blake Avenue into a thoroughfare.

They asked that the side street be made safer by lowering the speed limit, building a sidewalk, and/or using special signage.

But the city's engineering staff found no evidence of a speed problem there that needed fixing.

To set safe speed limits, traffic engineers have traditionally used a statistical metric known as 85th percentile speed.

That's the speed below which 85 per cent of all vehicles are observed to move under free-flowing conditions.

In other words, it's the speed that only 15 per cent of drivers violate.

Between McNabb and Wawanosh, city staffers counted 499 vehicles a day, with an 85th percentile speed of 51 kilometres an hour.

Things were even slower between Wawanosh and Oryme, with 342 vehicles counted per day, at an 85th percentile speed of 39 kilometres an hour.

"As the traffic volumes on Blake Avenue are relatively low and the speed data collected is at or below the speed limit, the data does not suggest there is a traffic speed issue on this street," says Carl Rumiel, the city's manager of design and transportation engineering.

However, Rumiel pointed out that the city’s traffic-calming procedures require that a street have at least one sidewalk before speed humps can be considered.

"This is for pedestrian safety because these traffic-calming measures sometimes cause erratic driving behaviour of motorists attempting to swerve away from the speed table. Since Blake Avenue has no sidewalk, it is not a candidate for speed tables," Rumiel said in his written report to Mayor Provenzano and city councillors.

At Monday night's City Council meeting, Coun. Niro and his Ward 3 counterpart Matthew Shoemaker were wanting to know whether we could get a sidewalk built on one side of Blake Ave. – and hence, speed humps?

Don Elliott, the city's director of engineering services replied that many other streets are higher on the priority rankings than Blake.

But Elliott also said there's been talk of allowing access to Great Northern businesses from Blake Ave., something that would help tip the scales in favour of Blake because of expected traffic increases.

"Would that speed it up?" Niro asked.

"I suppose it would," Elliott replied. "If council gave the permission for businesses to have access to that road, we would expect the traffic volume to go up and therefore, perhaps, some traffic calming because the other side of the road is residential."

"The short answer is yes, that would move it up the list."

"This road... parallels Great Northern Road and we recognize it as an acess from the back, or it may be in the future from many busineses. What we would do as an engineering department is monitor the situation and when we do our five-year capital road recommendations, we would review that street and see if it can be blended in. It is a good candidate....We could make that situation better with a sidewalk," Elliott said. 

Councillors took no direct action on the issue this week, opting to simply accept Rumiel's report as information.