Speed limit on rebuilt Queen Street still undecided

In August of last year, when city council granted approval in principle to our multi-year reconstruction of Queen Street, one major intent of the project was to reduce traffic speeds.

To make Queenstown more a destination than an east-west thoroughfare, city staff had pushed for a lower speed limit.

"The impact of increased vehicular travel time is minimal when compared to significant gains in safety and comfort for pedestrians, cyclists and those visiting Queen Street," Carl Rumiel, the city's director of engineering, and Peter Tonazzo, director of planning, said at the time.

"A limited number of people are not supportive of reduced speeds on the basis that it will increase their travel times or result in additional traffic on Wellington Street to avoid the reduced speeds " Rumiel and Tonazzo wrote in a report prepared for Mayor Shoemaker and city councillors.

"To put this into perspective, a speed reduction from 50 to 30 km/h would add approximately one to two minutes travel time through the downtown corridor," they argued.

Last week, as city staff were putting the final touches on bid documents for the project, it was clear no decision had been made on a downtown speed limit.

There'd been talk of a leisurely 40 km/h, even a slowpoke, rubbernecking, smell-the-roses 30 km/h.

But so far, no hard decision.

"The speed will have to be evaluated," Maggie McAuley, the city's municipal services and design engineer, told the annual meeting of the Downtown Association nine days ago at the Grand Theatre.

"It'll probably be while we're implementing it," McAuley said.

"The process is: you look at the different components and you add a score, and then your score kind of dictates the speed. High level, that's how we set speeds."

"The intent is that we will reduce the speed on Queen. I'm not sure if it's 30 or 40."

Paul Scornaienchi, the Downtown Association's vice chair, asked whether interlocking bricks of the kind used to pave Gore Street might be employed as a traffic-calming measure on Queen Street.

"There is no plan for paving stones within the roadway. That's not the way we're doing it," McAuley said.

"We have reduced the lane widths. That generally does help. And then signal timing — you can't gain speed, because you're stopping at red lights and things like that.

"Those details are still being figured out. We're working on the construction side and then we'll look at the results," McAuley said.

The City of Sault Ste. Mare issued a call for tenders on Wednesday, with an application deadline of April 24.

The final contract is expected to go to city council for approval on May 13, with construction starting as soon as possible after that.