Traffic Calming
Newburyport is actively trying to improve accessibility for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists throughout our city. This effort is largely achieved by many City Departments and entities, such as the Mayor's Office, Planning, Engineering, DPS, City Council, and public safety but also with a number of specialty groups, committees, and programs, such as, Traffic Safety Advisory Committee, Newburyport Livable Streets, Safe Routes to School, and Complete Streets Plan. The main objective with all of these stakeholders is to make our city safe for ALL modes of transportation and to shift our focus away from getting around in our cars to getting around on our feet or on our bikes. One way to achieve this is by implementing traffic calming measures. We are decades behind many countries in this area and our City has committed to making this a priority.
What is traffic calming? The Institute of Traffic Engineers (ITE) describes traffic calming as the following:
The primary purpose of traffic calming is to support the livability and vitality of residential and commercial areas through improvements in non-motorist safety, mobility, and comfort. These objectives are typically achieved by reducing vehicle speeds or volumes on a single street or a street network. Traffic calming measures consists of horizontal, vertical, lane narrowing, roadside, and other features that use self-enforcing physical or psycho-perception means to produce the desired effects.
The purpose of this webpage is to provide a depository of traffic calming measures, guidelines, construction details, studies, and other documents. This webpage is Under Construction and will be updated often.
If you have any suggestions for traffic calming or wish to implement calming measures in your neighborhood, go here to request attendance at the next TSAC meeting. TSAC created a Traffic Calming Subcommittee to address specific, detailed issues. This subcommittee's mission is to deal with the particulars, analyze the problem, perform data collection, and provide solutions based on the multitude of available calming measures identified herein.
Traffic calming measures can be found below. For now, we are going to provide these links to various documents and websites. We may eventually create our own guidelines but for now, these are what we typically reference in our planning, design and construction efforts: