Chicanes draw ire of councillor, residents

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/11/2023 (718 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The new traffic calming chicanes on Durum Drive have only been up for a couple of weeks — but if the city councillor for the area has his way, they won’t remain in place for long.

Two weeks ago, the city installed temporary chicanes (curves) on Durum Drive near the intersection with Neepawa Drive using white delineator poles bolted to the pavement and a temporary traffic circle at the intersection of Princess Avenue East and Douglas Street.

At Monday’s Brandon City Council meeting, Coun. Shawn Berry (Ward 7) expressed his disappointment over the installation of the chicanes and gave notice that he intends to put forward a motion to pursue other calming measures for the area.

“They were put up in short order with absolutely no communication with the residents, the ward councillor or any form of PSA or media release of what was being done,” Berry said, asking city administration to explain their handling of the situation.

“One of council’s main strategic goals is better communication with stakeholders in the city. This incident came well short of achieving that.”

City manager Ron Bowles conceded that the city could have done better with communication.

An announcement on both the chicanes and the mini traffic circle came this Monday, after both had already been installed.

“Community and council have been very involved with Durum Drive, we all know this,” Bowles said. “We were a little slow to start. We even had a special public meeting on this.”

That special meeting happened in February 2022, during which councillors and then-mayor Rick Chrest gathered to hear residents’ concerns over traffic safety on Durum Drive.

The previous December, Berry convinced his fellow council members to lower the speed limit on the street to 40 kilometres an hour.

The special meeting was relating to a subsequent request by Berry to make the stretch of Aberdeen Avenue between 34th Street and Durum Drive one-way so that motorists would not use it as a shortcut to bypass larger streets like Richmond Avenue and Patricia Avenue.

This week, Bowles said council’s direction had been to prioritize traffic safety, and that’s what the installation of the traffic calming measures was meant to achieve.

Berry responded that the public consultation took place more than a year and a half ago and while calming measures were discussed, chicanes were the least popular method among his residents.

“I don’t know why we didn’t look at other measures like a three-way stop at Marquis (Drive) and Durum, which was probably one of the best options,” he said.

After Monday’s meeting, Berry told the Sun that he doesn’t think chicanes are the right option for the street, but advance notice of their installation could have eased some tensions.

“I’ve had a lot of comments from people — emails, phone calls, even just comments in public when I’ve been out and about — to put it bluntly, ‘How stupid are those things?’” Berry said.

He acknowledged that he and his constituents are not traffic engineers, but his residents are the ones who use the street on a regular basis and have an idea of how things will likely work.

His concerns with the chicane surround safety.

When snow starts piling up and the street gets plowed, Berry said he is fearful that material will be pushed up against the side of the chicanes and narrow the road even further.

Another issue is the location, on either side of an intersection. Despite concerns around speed on the street, Berry said where the chicanes have been situated is not the problem area.

On top of that, he said the area doesn’t drain well after rainfalls and he thinks motorists might end up swerving through massive puddles. The areas blocked off by the chicanes will also deny parking to the nearby condos.

Berry told the Sun he had driven through the miniature traffic circle on Princess Avenue East and thought that would be a better solution.

The Sun reached out to city administration for comment on Berry’s criticism and received the following reply by email:

“Because this matter is a work-in-progress and is officially at the Council table, city administration will await any further direction from them regarding Durum Drive before commenting.”

Some residents on Durum Drive and surrounding streets spoke to the Sun about the chicanes, all of whom said they did not like them.

In an email, Andrew and Kerri Holden said one of their main concerns was visibility — that the poles would not be visible in the snow. They said this had been partially rectified by city staff putting yellow tape on the poles, but they are worried it is still not visible enough.

They added that they are also concerned about snowplows navigating through the chicanes and that the location at the intersection could become a safety issue.

“We’ve actually noticed quite a difference in the speed of traffic on our street since the speed limit was reduced to 40 km/h,” they wrote.

“We have small children and don’t want to see speeding or unsafe driving. However, we don’t think the chicanes will be effective in reducing speeding since they are on one entrance of the street. Speeding, if it happens, tends to happen more around the Prelude (Bay) area, in our opinion.”

Veronica Miller, who lives on Durum between the two legs of Prelude Bay, said by phone that she tries to avoid going through the chicanes since they were installed.

“At night, people are just zooming down the street, even with those calming (measures),” she said. “It’s so close to the stop sign, why bother having it? And I don’t want it anywhere else, because then it takes parking away.”

Miller said she doesn’t believe any calming measures are warranted for Durum Drive, saying that she’s lived there for 28 years and has only seen three accidents.

Another local, Patricia Toth, lives on Prelude Bay. She said she thinks the chicanes are more likely to cause accidents than prevent them.

“I think that they might be good for slowing traffic down, but they’re not good for reducing the speeders that are causing potential accidents because people going 40 to 45 kilometres (an hour) aren’t the ones causing the potential for serious accidents,” she said.

Though she said she remembers getting some kind of advance notice that a traffic calming measure was going to be introduced, it did not state what exactly it was going to be.

While she said she had talked to a city staff member about the chicanes, she felt they were trying to convince her of the benefits rather than hearing out her concerns.

Toth said she would be in favour of maintaining the lowered speed limit on Durum, but would like the chicanes removed.

Raelene Thompson lives in a condo near the intersection. Beyond the chicanes taking away her guest parking, she said the measure seems to be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

She said she spoke with a member of city staff, who couldn’t identify any accidents having taken place at the intersection.

“I potentially see it creating some issues,” she said. “You can almost see a head-on collision coming or a fender bender.”

While she’d like to see the chicanes removed, Thompson said she’d be happy to see a three-way stop implemented and is fine with the 40 km/h speed limit being retained.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» X: @ColinSlark