Review Revised Design: Arnold Palmer Drive - West
Review Revised Design: Arnold Palmer Drive - West
Welcome back! We have heard feedback from your neighborhood on the proposed safety improvement to Arnold Palmer Drive - West. We are excited to share the revised design. All feedback was taken into consideration while also using best practices to make sure we provide the safest option for your neighborhood. Please review the final design by 5 PM on October 23.
Why this project?
The City has identified Arnold Palmer Drive - West for a traffic calming project, which will improve safety for those driving, walking, and biking in your neighborhood. Our goal is safer streets for all! Your street was identified because:
- There have been two speed-related crashes on Arnold Palmer Drive - West in the last three year.
- Typical driving speeds are 37 MPH (Speed limit is 25 MPH).
We have already shared education materials with neighbors and had one open comment period on proposed safety improvement.
Design
City staff are recommending speed cushion to slow speeding on Arnold Palmer Drive - West. These devices would be placed every 600 feet along Arnold Palmer Drive - West from Brier Club Lane to Brier Creek Parkway.
Below is a summary of the feedback gathered when the neighborhood was asked to react to the proposed design.
What We Heard from the Community
- Neighbors were concerned about impacting emergency response times.
- Staff is recommending Speed Cushions be implemented based on these neighborhood conversations around emergency response times.
- Neighbors shared their concerns that there were too many treatments and how it would "punish" residents driving along the street.
- Staff reviewed the originally proposed spacing and found most treatments are spaced close to 600' spacing and does not recommend reducing the overall number. If spacing is greater than 700'-800', it tends to create the ability for more aggressive driving and it creates pockets of unsafe streets with hard breaking at the traffic calming device locations. While it is understandable to desire fewer devices, studies and different placement strategies in Raleigh have found consistent placement is the only way for a street to have a consistent driver speed along its entirety.
- All devices are designed to be driven over at approximately the speed limit. As long as you are driving at a low to mid-20s speed, there should be minimal impact to your driving experience. It starts to impact people attempting to driver over approximately 30 mph. Past projects using these devices and similar spacing have found that normal traffic flow is around +1 mph of the posted speed limit with maximum speeds capped in the low 30s.
- Neighbors discussed the walking route around the neighborhood loop and the required crossing at Arnold Palmer Dr at Clubvalley Way due to the sidewalk being only on one side of the street. Requests to make this crossing safer were made through our neighborhood conversations.
- Staff has evaluated this intersection based on the neighborhood's request and per the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), it meets warrants for conversion. With this recommendation, the allway stop is being incorporated into the broader project design with the adjacent treatment being removed from the project.
This map shows the chosen locations of the devices. You can also view a larger PDF of this map.
Purple font will signify plan alterations
