How to Get a Speed Limit Changed on Your Street

Many people are frustrated by motorists traveling at excessive speeds on their street. It may be that there actually are a large number of motorists exceeding the posted speed limit. If this is the case, you should contact the local enforcement agency and ask them to patrol your street. However, it also could be a matter of perception and the vehicles are really not traveling too fast. The third option is that motorists are in fact obeying a posted speed limit that is too high for the roadway conditions. The following steps will tell you how to determine if the legal posted speed limit is appropriate, and if not, how to go about getting it reduced.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A car with a working odometer
• A Road
• A Phone
• A stopwatch or a battery operated clock or watch with a second hand
• Writing instrument and paper

1. Determine the legal speed limit on your street. This will be posted on black and white regulatory speed limit signs. If there are no regulatory speed signs, the legal limit is the general statewide speed limit. Yellow and black speed limit signs are recommended speed signs and are difficult to enforce.

2. Using the odometer in your car, measure the length of your street, or segment of the roadway that you are concerned about, to the nearest tenth of a mile.

3. Using a stop watch or second hand on a clock determine the amount of time it takes you to travel the road segment at a comfortable speed. Make at least four runs recording each result.

4. Find the average travel time by adding all the results and dividing by the number of runs you made.

5. Divide the measured distance from step 2 by the average travel time determined in step 4. This will give you your average speed.

6. Compare your average speed with the posted speed limit.

7. If the posted speed limit is more than 5 MPH higher than your average speed and you would like to see the legal speed limit lowered, you should request this in writing to your municipality. Include your findings in the letter and tell them you would like to see this request addressed at their next board meeting.

8. After writing the letter follow up with a phone call to the municipality asking when the next meeting that is open to the public is scheduled. Also, ask them if your speed limit request will be on the agenda.

9. Attend the next scheduled meeting. If the request is not on the agenda, bring it up during the Public Comment portion of the meeting.

10. Once you get the municipality to agree to consider your request they will have the roadway evaluated by a professional engineer. If the evaluation determines that a speed limit reduction is warranted, a new legal speed limit will be posted. Whatever the findings are, you should be notified by the municipality. If a new speed limit is not posted and you do not receive a response outlining the reasons why, follow up with the municipality.

Tips & Warnings

• When making trial runs of the road make sure you drive at the speed you are comfortable with and not an unrealistically high or low speed.
• If you ask for enforcement of the speed limit on your street be careful that you are not a violator yourself.