State Tells Area Towns To Eat Dust Mayor Seek Lower Speed Limits, Get Statistics

City Councilwoman Beverly Young looks upon Rathdrum’s main street - Highway 41 - and sees a blur of speeding cars zipping dangerously into her city.

Maxine Fecko, mayor of Parkline, sees the same thing in her tiny town on Highway 5.

Despite being municipal leaders, neither can perform a seemingly simple task - reducing the speed limit.

Because their main streets are both state highways, the leaders have to beg the Idaho Transportation Department to make the change.

Beg they have, but the answer’s always the same: No dice.

“Over 10 years, I have a stack of letters an inch thick telling me why they (the department) won’t do it,” Fecko said. “We’ve even borrowed a radar gun and done our own testing.”

In both cases, state traffic engineer Tom Baker said his reason is simple. He studied traffic patterns and came to a conclusion - there is no speeding problem.

“I’ve explained it to both of them,” Baker said. “We follow a national way of determining speed limits. But they don’t agree.”

That misunderstanding is common, engineers say. In fact, it’s so common that Baker keeps a boilerplate explanation on a shelf near his desk.

It reads: Speed limit methods are used nationwide, and dictated by state law. They are set at the speed 85 percent of motorists would drive voluntarily.

“It is a proven procedure which provides safety through uniformity,” it states.

Young and Fecko admit they don’t understand.

The speed limit along Highway 41 slows to 35 mph in downtown Rathdrum. But the city has grown, and Young wants that slow zone extended south a half-mile.

“There’s a school out there and as soon as people hit that 55 mph sign, they gun it,” Young said. “We haven’t had accidents there - yet - but somebody’s going to get hurt.”

In Parkline, formerly called Chatcolet, the story is similar. The speed limit through the half-mile long town is 45 mph.

“I’ve almost been killed myself, if not for the grace of God,” Feckel said. “We ask and ask but all we get in reply is ‘national statistics this’ and ‘85th percentile that’ and blah, blah, blah.”

Other engineers said it’s always hard to get residents to trust traffic engineering methods.

If kids are playing near a street where traffic is 25 mph, people will think it’s too fast, said Bruce Noble, a former Post Falls city engineer.

“But it doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Traffic engineering is not an observed science. It’s statistics.”

Before becoming city engineer, a friend told him “I would grow to hate traffic because everyone thinks he’s a traffic engineer and that his street is the busiest in the city,” Noble said. “He was exactly right.”

But, Noble says, engineers as a group “aren’t the best communicators either.”

Fecko said engineers have never answered her biggest question.

“Why not lower the speed anyway?” she asked. “Does it harm or bother anybody?”

Yes, Baker said. Accidents are more likely when a road is “too slow” because most drivers will still likely drive the speed that’s comfortable.

“There will be more rear-end accidents,” he said.

The explanation satisfies neither Young nor Fecko, who both plan to continue their campaigns. Young has even joined forces with Lakeland School Superintendent Bob Jones.

“We’ll just go after Baker again and again until he listens,” Young said. “That’s how we first got our street lights downtown.”

, DataTimes