Oak Harbor city staff is working on an updated traffic safety plan.

The plan, called a “traffic calming program” was last updated in 2006. The goal of traffic calming is to increase roadway safety by implementing solutions that reduce speeding, collisions, injuries and fatalities.

Complaints regarding traffic and speeding in the city have been common themes of public comments shared at council meetings in recent months.

City Engineer Alex Warner gave a presentation on traffic calming at a city council workshop Thursday. He said education, enforcement and engineering are keys to traffic safety.

The city, in partnership with the Island Regional Transportation Planning Organization, Island County, Island Transit and the cities of Coupeville and Langley, have jointly applied for a Safe Streets and Roads for All grant.

Safe Streets and Roads for All is a grant program that is part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a federal bipartisan law. It provides money for traffic calming, but Oak Harbor has to have a safety action plan in place to receive the funds. Warner said a safety action plan is a holistic, well-defined strategy to prevent roadway fatalities and serious injuries, including policies, procedures and projects to establish safe streets for all.

Warner said he was “very optimistic” that the city will receive the grant money.

The public works department’s engineering division collects citizen-submitted traffic concerns and determines if action needs to be taken in response. Warner said there are insufficient funds to deal with traffic problems in the city.

“We need to always keep in mind our staffing and budgetary restraints,” he said.

Increasing traffic safety can be costly. Speed humps – which are different from speed bumps – are 14 feet in length and 2 inches tall and cost $12,000 each. Rapid rectangular flashing beacons, which are flashing signs at pedestrian crosswalks, cost $14,000. Speed limit radar signs, which tell drivers how fast they’re going, cost $7,500.

Historically, the money has come out of the city’s Streets Operation Fund.

“We haven’t had a set aside specifically for traffic calming, so there’s always been this push and pull of okay, we’re competing with the funds for potholes and the other costs that the street department bears,” Warner said.

For the 2023-2024 biennium budget, $30,000 has been allotted for traffic calming.

Warner said he thought that amount of money was “acceptable and appropriate” but added that it was not enough to cover engineering traffic calming solutions, such as speed humps.

For the last nine months or so, Warner said he has told residents that have put in citizen action requests that an engineering solution is warranted “but we don’t have any funds to implement it so essentially, we have some backlog there.”

Other items that may be recommended to reduce speeding include automated traffic enforcement, narrowing lanes and reducing speed limits city-wide.

“It is good to keep in mind with any of these changes, especially speed limit reductions, we can’t just go out there and change the speed limit on the signs,” Warner said. “All that will do is increase the amount of speeding violations and the (police department) does not have the resources right now to go out and do additional speed enforcement.”

Citizen concerns will be considered alongside the safety action plan.

“What I’m hoping the safety action plan will do is change our program from being reactive to proactive,” Warner said.

During the meeting, Deputy Fire Chief Mike Buxton said about five or six pedestrians are hit by vehicles each year in Oak Harbor.