Council Member Wong questions DOT on school-zone traffic studies
Council Member Wong asks whether DOT's traffic control studies near schools, daycares, and playgrounds capture arrival and dismissal periods. DOT says it uses 24-hour counters and peak-hour observations, relies on local input, and will follow up on expedited review criteria.
Thank you, Majority Leader and Chair.
I requested a lot of traffic devices near intersections of schools, daycares, and playgrounds.
And my question here is to DOT.
DOT's reply usually says they need traffic control studies, which can take four to seven months, depending on the device under review.
And my question is, when a request involves a school, daycare, or playground, how does DOT make sure it's
Observations capture the periods when kids are actually crossing, and our studies conducted during arrival and dismissal while school is in session.
Please answer that.
Sure, and that's a great question and something that we really do try to pay attention to.
Most intersections around the city, you try to capture the morning and the evening rush hour, but we know near schools or sometimes near parks, you get a different peak of when kids might be crossing the street.
Sometimes it's a Saturday afternoon right near a park.
And so what we do is we put down counters that can give us like a 24-hour count as a starting place so that when we go and count pedestrians, we can make sure we're doing it at the peak hours for those locations.
And then we look and we see, hey, there's a school right there.
We need to make sure that we're capturing school dismissal.
We do try to be very aware.
Sometimes there's something that we might not know about a neighborhood, right?
You don't know that there's a special event that happens midday is there.
And that's where we rely on input from local council members and other experts who can tell us, make sure you check this hour, and we will go and do that.
As a follow-up, what conditions qualify a location for an expedited review or interim protection while a longer study is underway?
So we'll have to get back to you because that's beyond my specific expertise.
But one thing I will talk about is if there's been a recent history of crashes, right, and we're responding to some to like very recent events, then that's something that we have to take into account and make sure we're being.
Responsive to something newer going on.
Okay, thank you.