Saint John will look to install speed cushions on 12 more streets throughout the city next year.
Last week, council approved an extra $450,000 for traffic calming measures in 2025.
Transportation Director Tim O’Reilly said they have seen a rise in requests for traffic calming from the community.
“We typically receive about 20 requests a year in previous years to calm traffic. That amount has tripled over the last number of years,” said O’Reilly.
“As a result, we have a current backlog of around 300 traffic calming requests, again many of these coming from impassioned members of our community to address their safety concerns.”
Speed cushions were first added to the city’s traffic calming policy in 2022 as a “go-to” measure for slowing down vehicles.
While similar to a speed bump or speed hump, O’Reilly said speed cushions contain gaps to reduce the impact on emergency services and Saint John Transit.
Over the past years, city staff have conducted speed cushion pilot projects on McNamara Drive and Douglas Avenue.
“On McNamara Drive, we were successful at reducing the speeds on that street by nine kilometres an hour and volumes decreased by 60 per cent,” said O’Reilly.
“Just recently on Douglas Avenue, after we implemented the speed cushions on that street, we had a speed reduction of 3.5 kilometres per hour.”
Perhaps more impressive, said O’Reilly, is they saw a 20 per cent increase in vehicles travelling within the 40 kilometre per hour speed limit.
In addition to McNamara Drive and Douglas Avenue, speed cushions are currently installed on Cedarwood Drive and Spar Cove Road, and are being set up on Dever Road.
Staff have already selected six of the 12 streets for 2025: Prince Street, Champlain Drive, Wellesley Avenue, Boars Head Road, Green Head Road and Mountain View Drive.
In addition, staff are looking at temporary rubber speed cushions on busier collector or arterial streets, with the first being proposed for Mount Pleasant Avenue East.
