ANN ARBOR, MI - Should Ann Arbor reduce speeds on all city-owned streets to 25 mph to make them safer?

That's one of the many ideas the city's new Speed Reduction Committee will be studying in the coming months.

The city's Transportation Commission voted Wednesday night, Aug. 16, to form the new committee, which is tasked with researching speed issues and making recommendations by the end of this year.

"I'm pretty darn excited about it," said Linda Diane Feldt, the city's Transportation Commission chairwoman.

Feldt served for a year and a half on the city's Pedestrian Safety and Access Task Force, which in 2015 made a set of recommendations to the City Council, taking a position that residential streets are experiencing motor-vehicle speeds that are too fast for spaces shared by cyclists and pedestrians.

The task force recommended measures to reduce driving speeds through both speed-limit reductions and engineering solutions.

At Wednesday night's meeting, Feldt said her thinking in the past was, "That's a terrible idea, reducing speed. That just sounds stupid."

But after a year and a half on the pedestrian safety task force, she said, she was convinced it was the most important recommendation the task force could possibly make.

And now a new Speed Reduction Committee will be taking a closer look at the issue. It's a subcommittee of the Transportation Commission made up of a few members of the commission, including City Council Member Chip Smith, D-5th Ward, who has campaigned on improving pedestrian and bicycle safety. A few members of the general public also could serve on the committee.

"This has been something that council and other people have been asking for, for quite a long time, and so, again, in one of our bold moves, we decided to just bring it up and let a committee hash over it," Feldt said of the new committee's formation.

Areas of focus for the Speed Reduction Committee include:

Reducing speeds on all city-owned streets to 25 mph

Further speed reductions in residential areas

Suggestions for speed reduction on state-owned roads within the city

Suggestions to reduce crashes and improve safety

A proposed resolution to City Council regarding lowering speeds citywide to calm traffic and improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety

Implementation methods

Gathering information from other communities (i.e., benchmarking research) to address implementation and gaining support for a speed-reduction program

A comprehensive approach to lowering speeds which may include engineering, educational efforts, and changing current speed limits

The committee's recommendations will go to the full Transportation Commission for consideration. If approved by the commission, they then would go to the City Council for consideration.

The committee plans to work with city staff. Several city staff members were at Wednesday night's meeting, including City Administrator Howard Lazarus, City Engineer Nick Hutchinson, Transportation Program Manager Eli Cooper and others.

The City Council briefly considered a proposal two years ago to limit driving speeds to 25 mph on all near-downtown neighborhood streets. The council voted to refer the issue to city staff to further engage the public on how to address speeding problems.

While it's already the case that many Ann Arbor streets already have a 25-mph limit, the limit on other streets ranges from 30-45 mph.