Bay Roberts to lay down policy on speed bumps

By Craig Westcott/October 21, 2021

The new council will craft a speed bump policy as the result of a letter from a citizen on Cleary’s Road.

Chief administrative officer Nigel Black said in the past, the Town responded to such requests by letting residents know its practice is to restrict placement of speedbumps to areas near schools and recreation facilities.

“We’ve typically denied them elsewhere,” said Black, who admitted it’s not actually a written policy. “If council wants to change that and come up with a more detailed policy, then certainly we could refer it committee and you could look at that. In this case, they are looking at (a speed bump for) a preschool facility, so it does, I think, have some merit. But it’s not something we would have typically done before.”

Mayor Walter Yetman said he agreed 100 per cent with developing a policy. “I would like to see a policy worked on,” he said. “I think our public works (staff and committee) could have input, I think our protective services officer should have input, and I think we should probably get some recommendations from the RCMP, for their opinion, and our Fire Department, because of emergency vehicles.”

Yetman said the town is getting such requests regularly and council needs not only to take the issue seriously, but also develop a solid policy that it can refer to for guidance.

Deputy Mayor Geoff Seymour said the request speaks to a bigger issue – traffic safety generally. “In the last few weeks when I was campaigning, the number of people who brought up the speed issue was just about non-stop,” he said. “Wherever you went, people were voicing their concerns about the speeds. And I experienced it myself when I was walking down the road campaigning. There were two or three times there where I just went ‘Whoa, like get out of the road (because of a speeding car going by.’ So I think the committee for speed bumps is a good idea. We need to formalize something, but there’s a bigger issue and that’s speed in this town… We really need to get ahead of this. It certainly is an issue.”

Councilor Dean Franey said he heard the same concerns during his campaign. “And I think what I found to be the most discouraging is that a lot of the speeders are people who live in the neighborhoods,” he said. 

“We hear it all over the place, all the time, everyday,” agreed Mayor Yetman. 

Put to a vote, council agreed unanimously to refer the issue to its committees for input on designing a policy.