The traffic department will recommend slowing Hamilton's default speed limit to 40 km/h on residential streets.

The province has introduced a bill designed to give cities more options to protect pedestrians, such as reintroducing photo radar or lowering the default speed limit on unsigned roads. Right now, that default limit is 50 km/h.

Over the last few years, Hamilton's traffic department has been flooded with individual neighbourhood requests for speed limit changes - so much so the city briefly ran out of signs last year. In 2015, 40 km/h signs were installed on 250 streets, with hundreds of requests left outstanding.

This year, more than $1 million in sign installations are on order.

But now, the city is putting most of those 40 km/h sign installations "on hold" in expectation of an imminent change in provincial law, said Coun. Jason Farr, who alerted residents in an email explaining the lack of sign action in Ward 2 neighbourhoods.

"Pretty much every neighbourhood association in my ward has asked for them," he said Friday.

A Ministry of Transportation spokesperson said Friday the bill is still before the legislature, but Farr said traffic staffers expect "imminent" good news.

Once the proposed provincial law is passed, the traffic department intends to recommend a default speed limit change across the city, he said.

"I will absolutely support that," Farr said. "That's a lot of money we can save on individual signs and instead put towards other safety and traffic-calming initiatives."

Farr said traffic staff alerted him of the plan Friday and noted some 40 km/h signs will still be installed in school safety zones or around parks.

The push for default slower streets has been a long time coming.

Ontario's chief coroner recommended the province cut the default limit to 40 km/h in 2012, noting pedestrians struck by a car at 50 km/h are twice as likely to die as those hit at the lower speed.

In 2013, a report by the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton found the risk of injury to pedestrians locally was significantly higher than the provincial average.

That was around the same time the city endorsed a new Pedestrian Mobility Plan and began using red-light camera fines in earnest to pay for new street safety initiatives.

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Social planner Sara Mayo applauded the proposed change in default speed limit "really important for pedestrian safety."

Mayo added she hoped the city would go a step further and allow neighbourhoods more opportunity to experiment with even lower speeds, similar to the North End pilot project at 30 km/h.