Speed Limit Law Needs Retooling

It is hardly realistic to believe drivers will adjust speeds to what is really safe.

Something is wrong when the chosen methodology for setting speed limits on local streets can be demonstrated to produce higher speeds and more injury accidents. This is the case, for example, along a stretch of 17th Street in Santa Ana. There, speeding cars have resulted in more than 40 injuries a year in a city with the highest pedestrian fatality rate in Southern California.

One would think that a city that has an increase in injuries would be decreasing speed limits, not raising them. But Santa Ana actually has raised these speed limits on many of its local roads in the past few years. The culprit is a well-intentioned idea that has been codified by the state, and is implemented by local engineers. That idea seems sensible enough, and certainly provides an opportunity for ticketed motorists to challenge limits that they can show are slower than what people really travel. But it is hardly realistic to believe drivers will adjust speeds to what is really safe.

The city argues that its hands are tied. The state requires that limits be set at or near the speed traveled by 85% of motorists. This has led many other cities to boost limits, and clearly there are instances where limits may be too low for what is actually safe.

Newport Beach, mindful that tickets can be thrown out of court, simply has opted to maintain the lower speed limits it wants on certain streets, but forgo writing tickets. That may be a practical way around having tickets tossed out, but it isn’t a very satisfactory way of setting traffic policy.

For Santa Ana, about a third of all fatal pedestrian accidents in recent years have taken place on streets where the limits have increased. As Times reporter Richard Marosi recently detailed, accidents on a portion of Warner Avenue went from 14 before an increase in the limit to 27 afterward.

There has to be a way to provide more room for adjustment on both ends. Nobody knows better what’s safe than local citizens on the streets and sidewalks of a neighborhood. A policy made without concern for pedestrians is far too car-oriented anyway.

In a city like Santa Ana, where many are on foot, there ought to be a way for these citizens to collaborate with the engineers. The engineers ought not be be bound so rigidly by the dictates of Sacramento.