The Dover Police Department conducted a five-day traffic study on East Loockerman Street in March after hearing community concerns on traffic and speeding in the area.
The study included data from March 21-26.
East Loockerman has a speed limit of 25 miles per hour, and police chief Thomas Johnson said the street doesn’t see a high volume of speeding violations or accidents according to this year’s study and another from 2023.
“Across the two studies, the enforceable violations hover between 4 and 7% of the cars that are going down the street,” Johnson said.
The 7 percent number is from this year’s study. Johnson said there isn’t typically an enforceable speeding violation until a driver is 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. The average speed in the March study was 28 miles per hour, with the 85th percentile driving at 34 miles per hour.
Officers have to consider both the average and the 85th percentile, as the average can be skewed by people slowing down to pull into their driveways.
Johnson said three accidents have been reported on East Loockerman in the last three years, with two of those involving a vehicle striking a parked car and resulting in property damage.
“We follow the data, and we have other zones of the city that have much higher enforcement ratings, much higher accident rates, much higher speed violations and limited resources,” Johnson said.
That includes Mifflin Road, which was studied this month. The PD finds Mifflin a high enforcement area, with the 85th percentile speed at 39 miles per hour.
“I saw a traffic study that tells me that I got a much bigger problem. The Mifflin Road corridor… While we're in there evaluating the truck traffic, we also noted that people were kind of zipping along, and that's got that corridor's got a double digit enforceable violations rating.”
About one third of drivers on Mifflin Road are driving at speeds that are enforceable violations, according to a study done in the last month. East Loockerman only sees 7 percent of cars speeding enough to get a violation.
Johnson said he welcomes residents to continue reporting their concerns to Dover PD.
