Granite Street wins lower speed, bumpy road


Eleven months after her quest began, Beth Gister finally got what she wanted Monday night: measures from the Henderson government to make her block safer.

The City Council voted 8-0 at its regular meeting Monday night to lower the speed limit on Granite Street between Chestnut and Garnett streets from 35 to 25 mph and to install one or more speed bumps or speed humps to slow traffic heading for Raleigh Road, which starts on the other side of Garnett Street.

City Engineer Frank Frazier is to make a recommendation to the council March 21 on the number and type of bumps to be installed on Granite Street. But the council’s vote Monday means something will be installed, and the speed-limit change is effective immediately. Whatever is installed, it will be there for 90 days as a test; if it works at slowing cars, the measure could stay.

“Originally, we just asked for a reduction in the speed limit,” Gister said. “It would be a lot cheaper.”

Mayor Clem Seifert said the city wants to be sure that any action it takes is effective, and the staff’s opinion is that lowering the speed limit alone wouldn’t make a difference.

The council acted one week after it refused to lower the speed limit on a 4-3 decision, with Seifert casting a rare tie-breaking vote. Yet it took that action while holding out hope for Gister to get a better result if she refused to give up.

It was a bureaucratic process that frustrated Gister and dragged out what she thought was a simple decision to enhance the safety of children on her Old West End block. At the same time, she became the test case that allowed the city to develop a workable policy to handle future requests for “traffic-calming” measures.

The City Council approved that policy in December, long after deciding that it shouldn’t handle Gister’s petition for a lower speed limit the way it had handled similar requests. For example, the council lowered the speed limit on Lynne Avenue to 25 mph a few months before Gister presented her petition last April.

Under the new city policy, requests for lower speed limits, speed bumps or rumble strips are referred to the council’s Public Safety Committee and to Frazier and the police for the collection of data on traffic speeds and accidents. The city staff presents the data to the Public Safety Committee, which makes a recommendation based on the numbers to the full council. If the data don’t support the requested traffic measures, the council is expected to reject the request but to notify the person making the request that a petition with the signatures of at least two-thirds of affected residents could persuade the council to ignore the data.

City staff found that the average speed for traffic on Granite Street for a 24-hour period Dec. 29 and 30 was 26 mph and that the speed of cars in the 85th percentile, a standard measure for traffic studies, was 32.67 mph, compared with a speed limit of 35 mph. The study found that 8.96 percent of 1,005 vehicles were speeding.

Those numbers didn’t justify any city action, Frazier told the council last week, although Gister complained about the low-traffic dates chosen and noted that 26 vehicles in 24 hours exceeded 50 mph.

Still, the city policy gave her a second chance with the petition option (her first petition wasn’t accepted in part on the grounds that it called only for lowering the speed limit, a step that Frazier and Police Chief Glen Allen advised wouldn’t slow down the cars on Granite). It took Gister a couple of hours March 1, the day after the council rejection, to gather the necessary signatures on a new petition calling for the lower speed limits and “traffic calming/slowing measures such as speed bump/hump.”

Of 15 houses in the 100 block of Granite Street, plus a house with a Chestnut Street address that has a driveway on Granite, three are vacant. Gister got signatures from residents of 12 of the other 13 houses.

That was more than enough support to win over the council. While Gister and her husband, Marty, kept control of sons Andy, 33 months old, and Ryan, 18 months, and several of their neighbors watched from the audience, the council passed Elissa Yount’s resolution to lower the speed limit and raise bumps in the road.

Andy, whose blue shirt matched his wide blue eyes as he hung on to his mother’s left hand through much of the proceedings, was a visible reminder of why Beth Gister was so persistent through 11 months of frustration. Andy was born with spina bifida and is due for his third corrective surgery this month, Gister said.

His condition makes his walking slow and unsteady, so he’s vulnerable to vehicles flying down the street, Gister said. She said her front porch is 16 feet from the street, roughly the distance from the public’s lectern to Seifert’s seat at the council meeting.

“If a car is trying to make that light, he is not going to be able to get out of the way,” Gister said.

Even in approving what the neighborhood requested, the council found plenty of room for disagreement. From whether to install one bump, as the Public Safety Committee had recommended as a test case, or two, as Gister suggested, to whether fixed asphalt bumps or portable plastic humps would work better, most council members had opinions.

Complicating the question was the cost. Frazier said one portable hump would cost roughly $2,000; Yount said that pouring some asphalt and slapping on some yellow paint, as was done at Southern Vance High School, would cost very little as an effective alternative. No matter what option the city chooses, it can spend Powell Bill funds — state money set aside for city roads — and simply reduce the amount it uses on paving projects at the end of the year.

The council’s compromise was to let Frazier put together a recommendation on type, number and cost of traffic-calming measures. That produced a unanimous vote, but two council members expressed reservations: Lonnie Davis cast his vote “reluctantly” because of the departure from the Public Safety Committee’s recommendation on “humps or bumps or stumps or whatever,” and Harriette Butler said her vote was contingent on Davis’ committee being satisfied.

After her victory Monday night, Gister was still too steamed over the 11-month odyssey to celebrate or to express much relief. “We tried to make it simple and inexpensive,” Gister said in explaining why the initial petition was for a 25-mph speed limit and not speed bumps, “but that wasn’t good enough.”