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Council directs staff to revise traffic‑calming policy: move toward data-driven prioritization and city-funded fixes for qualifying streets
Summary
After months of neighborhood requests, councilors told staff to update the traffic-calming policy to emphasize empirical data, create a scored prioritization list, and fund qualifying projects from city budgets rather than relying on neighborhood cost‑sharing; staff will return with an ordinance.
Sandy Springs — The City Council work session on Oct. 7 moved toward a new, data-driven approach to traffic calming: council members directed staff to update policy so the city prioritizes and funds projects that meet objective safety criteria rather than relying chiefly on neighborhood fundraising.
Public Works Director Marty Martin and Traffic and Transportation Unit Manager Kristen Westcott reviewed the traffic-calming program history, treatment types and recent studies. "As it stands today, a single resident in a neighborhood can request a traffic study," Martin said; staff proposed refining the process to require either an HOA request or a minimum of two unrelated residents to initiate a study.
Council direction and agreed changes: staff listed a suite of recommended amendments and received council support to proceed. Key points the council instructed staff to return with as ordinance language or policy updates included:
- Require at least two unrelated residents or the neighborhood HOA to request an initial traffic study (or retain the current option with clarifying language); - Clarify that the city will maintain traffic-calming installations once installed (including removal during repaving and reinstallation); - Raise the 80th‑percentile speed threshold for eligibility from 8 mph over the posted limit to 10 mph over (matching common practice and the enforcement buffer discussed elsewhere); - Exclude dead-end streets and very low-volume streets (less than 300 vehicles per day) from eligibility; - Remove passive pavement-marking treatments from the traffic-calming policy list and address them during repaving projects; and - Defer high‑cost reconstruction options (many roundabouts and chicanes) from the neighborhood traffic-calming menu and treat them as larger capital projects subject to prioritization and scoring.
Council members debated equity and logistics: some members argued that if a street meets objective safety criteria it should be city-funded and not subject to neighborhood fundraising. Others urged that staff produce a scoring matrix to prioritize projects by safety impact, injury history and feasibility. Councilman Andy Baumann said the city should "go back to the drawing board and say, what is our real goal here?" and asked staff to incorporate the high-injury network into prioritization.
Next steps: staff will draft an ordinance and updated administrative procedures reflecting council direction, including a mechanism to rank and score candidate streets and a clarification of funding/maintenance responsibilities; staff will return to council with the draft ordinance for formal action. No ordinance was adopted at the Oct. 7 meeting; current projects and previously approved work remain subject to existing policy until an ordinance is adopted.
Ending note: Council asked staff to evaluate truck routing on neighborhood streets and return recommendations for restricting nonlocal truck movements as a companion item to traffic-calming updates.
