Rehoboth Beach is moving ahead with a package of traffic calming measures directed at speeding on some of the city’s larger roads.
At a meeting last week, Commissioner Mark Saunders, who chairs the City Streets and Safety Advisory Committee presented a package of six recommendations from the committee. He stressed that these were chosen specifically because they would be easy to accomplish, and that more recommendations, including a package of recommendations addressing bicycle safety, would be coming later.
“These are 90-day suggestions, things that we think can be done quickly,” he said. “We know there's more to do.”
Many of the recommendations focus on major roadways in the city, like State, Henlopen, and Columbia. One thing the committee wants to see is more speed limit signs on those streets.
“If anybody has ever gotten off of Route 1 and come around under the bridge onto State Street, there's not a sign to tell you how fast you can go,” Saunders said.
The city’s budget for the next fiscal year already has allocations for several electronic signs that show the speed limit as well as a driver’s current speed. The money for those will be available in April, and some of those signs could be easily deployed to the problem areas the committee highlighted.
Saunders also recommended driveway boxes on streets where they are practical.
“It's a simple box painted on the street in front of your driveway. It goes out like one car [width]. It almost looks like a yellow parking space,” he said. “A driver driving down the street sees these and it slows them down because they suspect that there's more activity. It's not a freeway, it's not the highway. There are houses and there are cars and it just informs them on a mental level that they need to watch where they're going.”
Another recommendation was to consult with police officials about heightened enforcement.
“There's no doubt that when we have a police presence on those streets, the traffic is slower. But the question, of course, is we can't be everywhere all the time,” he noted. “So we'd like to meet with the chief and see if maybe we need to maybe up the fines or create more fines and less warnings or what we have to do to give ourselves a reputation, if you will, of giving tickets to those that deserve them.”
Saunders’s colleague, Commissioner Chris Galanty urged quick action on the proposals.
“There is a clear and growing demand for these traffic calming initiatives and improvements,” he said.
City Manager Taylour Tedder said most of the recommendations could be put into place quickly, ideally before beach season begins.
“Looking at these recommendations, I don't see anything here that's jumping out at me as something that we can't do,” Tedder told commissioners. “But really it comes down to timing, resources, and if we would need to outsource any of these things to meet whatever timeline you'd like.”
Commissioners decided that the recommendations did not require a formal vote at next month’s meeting, and in the interest of getting them implemented quickly, elected to direct Tedder to move ahead with putting them into place.
