Henrico's changing approach to traffic-calming efforts

A planned traffic-calming effort on a busy neighborhood road in the Near West End is drawing mixed reviews from some citizens as it illustrates Henrico County’s changing approach to such efforts.

At issue: how county officials should determine when, or whether, to implement measures designed to reduce the speed of vehicles (such as speed bumps, mini roundabouts or other deterrents); how they should best gauge the desires of the citizens who live nearby; and whether their answers to those questions will prompt them to scrap some or all of a longstanding policy that typically has governed those actions.

The road in question is Anoka Road, which runs roughly one mile from Skipwith Road west to Fordson Road, just south of Interstate 64 and east of Parham Road. Anoka serves as a key spine road and entry point to a well-established residential area with more than 1,000 homes and no sidewalks. In 2021, county officials reduced the speed limit on the road from 35 mph to 25 mph, as part of a countywide safety initiative that resulted in similar speed limit reductions on 104 county roads.

Shortly thereafter, some residents of the corridor contacted Henrico officials to complain about frequent speeding on the road, which prompted Henrico Public Works officials to conduct a speed study there, Public Works Director Terrell Hughes told the Citizen.

“Neighbors or people who live in the neighborhood will reach out to us and ask us to investigate the street,” Hughes said, describing how such studies typically emerge – and how officials begin to determine whether a road might qualify for the county’s longstanding Neighborhood Traffic Management Program. “So we will measure speed based on requests.”

That two-phase program is meant to promote safer streets and reduce speeding by investigating a road’s signage and pavement markings and conducting speed studies to determine how to best address the issues.

According to the program’s page on the county’s website, the three-step first phase begins with a citizen request, which is followed by traffic studies and data analysis, and then (if the need for further action exists) a survey of affected homeowners, inviting their opinions about possible structural traffic-calming measures. If that phase reveals a speeding issue, then Henrico traffic engineering officials will request enforcement from Henrico Police.

For roads that advance to it, the three-step second phase involves the compilation of citizen responses, the installation of temporary devices intended to slow traffic and then the evaluation of their performances. If the temporary devices are shown to reduce average speeds, the county then will begin the process of installing permanent devices.

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But that timeline of events during the Anoka Road process has not followed that exact path, leaving some residents confused.

After the initial inquiries from residents, the county conducted a weeklong study of Anoka Road traffic in February 2022, examining a nearly half-mile stretch between a point 250 feet east of Milbank Road and a point 250 east of Monarda Road. It found that nearly 10,000 vehicles used the road during that time, and the 85th percentile of speed ranged between 33.8 mph near Milbank Road and 38 mph near Monarda Road, both above the posted limit of 25 mph. (Some residents noted that the previous decrease in the posted speed limit for Anoka accounted for the perceived speeding issue and that if the speed limit still were 35 mph, as it had been for years, that the typical vehicle speed would not be noticeably higher.)

With the data in hand, but before conducting any public surveys of residents – the next step outlined by the county’s policy – Public Works officials placed a temporary speed cushion at the end of Anoka, near Skipwith, in June 2022.

That caught some nearby residents off-guard.

“It was a shock to the car and then rattled me. It was really uncomfortable,” said one resident who called the traffic calming device “bone-jarring.” The resident, who lives near Tuckahoe Middle School and frequently drives on Anoka, said that she considered the device not a cushion, but a speed bump, better suited for parking lots instead of residential streets. Other residents wondered how such a device might impact emergency vehicles traveling on the road.

Then in March of this year, county officials installed flexible posts next to the speed cushions – a move that traffic analysis showed reduced the 85th percentile of speed in the corridor to between 27 and 29 mph. But by May, some residents reached out to Three Chopt District Supervisor Tommy Branin, who also grew up near Anoka Road, to prompt the speed cushion’s removal.

That led to the first of three community meetings (on May 25) about the corridor and possible speed mitigation efforts, during which Branin agreed with citizens who felt the speed cushion had been placed in a poor location. Shortly after that meeting, rumble strips were installed near Alvarado Road to test another possible method of speed mitigation.

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County officials held another public meeting June 26, then sent survey postcards to 1,439 homes in the area, seeking their thoughts about traffic-calming options – a step that appeared to come when plans for the corridor were already well into the second phase of the county’s Neighborhood Traffic Management Program.

The cards asked residents “Do you believe there is a speeding concern on Anoka Road that needs addressing?” and those who answered “Yes” were prompted to circle their preferred method of traffic management (speed cushions, mini-roundabouts, permanent “YOUR SPEED” radar-detection signs, or other). There also was a space for citizens to write-in additional comments.

But only 97 households (or less than 7% of those surveyed) responded by the July 14 deadline, county officials said during a third meeting, held July 17.

That Neighborhood Traffic Management Program policy dictates that at least 75% of the postcards sent to residents must be returned and at least 70% of the returned cards must be in favor of traffic-calming devices before they can be installed (guaranteeing that at least 52.5% of residents are in favor of the devices).

Some residents of the Anoka corridor interpreted the county’s policy – and potential installation of traffic-calming devices – to be dependent upon that citizen “vote” and expected that since the percentage of participation fell well below the required 75%, no permanent action would be taken.

But in the case of Anoka, county officials considered the postcards to be more about general support and feedback.

At the July 17 meeting, Hughes said that the majority of those 97 completed surveys from residents expressed support for traffic-calming devices. He termed the responses a “statistically significant result” and said that citizen support was not calculated solely based upon whether or not the respondent believed there was a speeding concern but also upon the traffic calming options that each circled.

And, Hughes told the Citizen, because this particular case involved so many residents, it wasn’t realistic to expect three-quarters of them to return the postcards.

“The intent of the postcard process is to allow us to garner public support from residents on a roadway that has a speeding issue,” Hughes explained, but added that ”in certain cases, a safety concern may necessitate an immediate action. In these cases, engineering judgment may be used to install structural traffic calming devices without the postcard process.”

Much of the written feedback from residents included frustration with the decrease in the posted speed limit from 35 mph to 25 mph. Others recommended four-way-stops at the busier, more dangerous intersections.

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Community resident John Tatum took a different position.

“Policies are established to ensure fairness and transparency and accountability from our government officials, that put safeguards against arbitrary decisions and ensure that the right and the voices of the community are not missed,” he said, suggesting that county officials were classifying Anoka as an immediate safety concern in order to “sidestep” citizen approval.

Tatum expressed concerns that county officials would not adhere to the policy’s requirement that 75% of postcards be returned and that unreturned postcards might be counted as votes in favor of the traffic-calming devices (which Branin told the Citizen was not the case).

“You can't make people participate in their own government,” said Branin, discussing the widespread lack of survey responses. “And if they don't participate in their own government, it's kind of hard to say you did the right thing or the wrong thing, because they're not speaking.”

The Neighborhood Traffic Management Program policy was written by a past county manager who was also a traffic engineer, Branin said, while pointing out that it is not an ordinance and therefore never required the approval of the Henrico County Board of Supervisors.

“I struggle with the word ‘vote’ in a policy, because if it's a policy, it's a recommendation, a guideline, which is why we can change it,” said Branin.

And that, Hughes told the Citizen, is what officials intend to do – potentially soon – though he didn’t detail exactly how the policy might change.

“The intent was not to be burdensome, and prevent us from ever doing anything, because that could be construed that way – ‘the program's overly burdensome, it's difficult to get engagement, so therefore nothing happens,’” said Hughes. “Whether people are for or against, what they do support, the comments that they make – all of that will be considered. So this is not a situation where we feel we want to do this and we're going to do it anyway.”

* * *

The program, Hughes said, already has expanded since its inception beyond just speed criteria. Traffic engineers now examine how a road in question is being used by pedestrians or other non-vehicles and cut-through traffic. Speed studies, citizen concern and guardrail strikes all contributed to the department officials’ decision to conduct speed studies on Anoka and install temporary speed cushions, he said.

County officials posted to Henrico’s website a map of potential traffic calming locations on Anoka (depicted above), which showed four mini-roundabout locations on Anoka and seven speed cushion locations throughout Anoka and Alvarado. Some residents felt that the suggested quantity of traffic calming devices was excessive and unnecessary, though Hughes said not all of them were likely to be installed – and those that are installed permanently may not be located at the exact locations shown on the map.

“Speed humps obviously can help to curb speeding and I'm all for the safety of the people that live on that street, walk, ride their bikes on that street, but it got so blown out of proportion because we were having difficulty getting straight answers,” said resident Kathy B. (who asked that her last name not be used), expressing her frustration and claiming that she had not been told why the original speed hump was placed, why that type was used and why the solution had increased to multiple speed humps and roundabouts. “It's just kind of excessive, like throw everything but the kitchen sink at the community and that'll shut them up because we're just going to have them go over all these speed humps. That's the way it seems to me. Whether it's true or not, I don't know.

“The least intrusive method, I think, should be used, especially when we're using county dollars.”

Many residents called for a stronger police presence to enforce the speed limit, but Hughes said at the July 17 meeting that law enforcement “can’t be everywhere all the time.”

“There’s no disincentive for speeding,” said Deputy County Manager for Community Operations Steven Yob, who noted that there was not enough police presence and that judges were not handing out harsh enough fines to speeders.

“People are not going to get caught. I can’t change that, you can’t change that tonight. But traffic-calming, structural traffic-calming, is there 24/7,” Yob said, citing before-and-after studies that show a 9% speed reduction.

While some residents felt frustrated about how the county has handled the Anoka project, others felt that the citizen approval process had gone on long enough.

“We came in here to three meetings. We’ve gone through this process and the same people keep arguing about the same things,” said one resident at the most recent community meeting. “The problem is somebody is going to get hurt and it’s only going to take one individual. Do you want it to be your child or grandchild? I don’t. Inconvenience me and put the humps up and down Anoka and Alvarado and let’s go forward.”

The next step will be for county officials to finalize exactly what type of physical traffic-calming devices will be used and where they will be placed.

Residents can expect installation of those devices in the fall, after school begins, Hughes told those in attendance at the July 17 meeting.

– Citizen Editor Tom Lappas contributed to this article.