Highland council hears widespread safety concerns on Canal Boulevard; staff to collect more data

Hundreds of residents and several council members pressed Highland City Council on Tuesday for urgent action to reduce speeding and crashes on Canal Boulevard, calling for permanent physical traffic-calming measures, more enforcement and improved crossings.

Residents from neighborhoods along Canal Boulevard described repeated crashes, near-misses involving children, and regular high-speed driving at night. “There’s a concrete fence with steel barriers a hundred yards away where a car drove all the way through those, back out of those,” said Don Osler, a resident who lives near Ashby Lane, describing multiple unreported incidents. “It’s NASCAR all the time.”

The council’s traffic engineer, identified in the meeting as Chris (City Engineer), reviewed data collected during a pilot program that installed temporary speed tables and traffic counters. The data showed an average speed reduction from about 35.3 mph to about 33.0 mph while speed tables were deployed, and a drop in the share of vehicles traveling 10 mph over the limit (40+ mph) from roughly 16% to about 4.7% when the tables were in place. The 85th-percentile speeds—used by traffic engineers to measure customary driving speed—moved roughly from 39.2 mph toward the high 30s during the study period, a figure the engineer…