CALGARY—City councillors are quietly considering design changes to residential streets and lowering speed limits in a bid to make Calgary streets safer.

It’s unclear when elected officials will pitch the idea, but Mayor Naheed Nenshi hinted “councillors for whom the No. 1 complaint continues to be residential speeding” will introduce a notice of motion very soon.

“The science is very, very clear that the biggest benefit to saving people’s lives is between 40 and 30 (km/h),” Nenshi said.

The NDP government recently announced the completion of the first phase of the city charter, which grants Calgary and Edmonton several new powers, including the authority to set residential speed limits.

Councillor Druh Farrell said early conversations have touched on road design and posted limits.

“It’s the next logical step with implementing the pedestrian strategy,” said Farrell. “Now that we have the legislative ability because of the charter.”

Calgary’s pedestrian strategy, approved by council in 2016, recommended dozens of changes to make neighbourhoods more walkable and to reduce pedestrian collisions and fatalities.

At the time, council rejected a key provision of the strategy that called on city administration to study the cost-benefit implications of lowering residential speed limits.

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Between 2013 and 2017, Calgary saw nearly 2,663 collisions involving pedestrians, resulting in more than 2,158 injuries and 36 fatalities, according to figures provided by the Calgary Police Service.

Greg Hart, co-founder of the advocacy group Vision Zero, said the issue is complicated and while lowering speed limits is a step in the right direction, it’s not the final solution to making city streets safer.

“(Calgary) is fully designed for cars, so even residential streets have incredible width and very few restrictions that would affect drivers at sort of a subconscious level and let them know that they should be moving more slowly,” Hart said.

“We have to actually start retrofitting some of the streets to get the outcomes that we want and not just depend on a sign or people’s good behaviour.”

Councillor Shane Keating, chair of the city’s transportation and transit committee, said he would support lowering the limit to 40 km/h and consider dropping it further if warranted.

“At this point, I’m looking at 40. Thirty is a bit on the slower side, but the reaction time at 40 km/h would vastly improve things,” Keating said.

Numerous studies have found pedestrians stand a far higher chance of surviving a collision with a vehicle travelling 30 km/h compared to one moving at 50 km/h.

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The city has previously pegged the financial impact of life-altering pedestrian collisions and fatalities to be as high as $120 million per year.

Calgary wouldn’t be the first Alberta municipality to lower its residential speed limit. In recent years, both Banff and Okotoks dropped the limit to 40 km/h. Airdrie set its limit to 30 km/h in the 1980s. Edmonton is currently examining whether to lower its residential speed limit.

Councillor Jyoti Gondek, vice-chair of the transportation and transit committee, agreed with Hart’s suggestion that the city needs to look beyond lower speed limits and examine and improve neighbourhood design flaws.

“For neighbourhoods like mine, the way that we’ve designed those neighbourhoods to be curvilinear is creating a lot of the problem,” said Gondek. “I don’t think that simply looking at speed limits is going to counter the issue.”

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