Traffic rules get mixed signals

City leaders in Costa Mesa look ready to put the brakes on a comprehensive set of rules for traffic calming measures.

Transportation staffers held a public meeting in April to explain various methods of controlling neighborhood traffic, such as speed humps and traffic circles, and that much was agreed to by the council.

But some council members don’t support the rest of what was planned: conducting a city-wide survey on residents’ concerns, holding meetings with a slew of homeowners’ associations and compiling all that input into a set of standards.

The point of the effort was to standardize the process of asking for neighborhood traffic control, city transportation manager Peter Naghavi said. For example, if people ask for speed humps now, they have to circulate petitions to neighbors and meet a standard of how many cars per day use their street. But there are no such standards for any of the various other measures available — roundabouts, wider curbs called chokers, or s-curves called chicanes, to name a few.

“The guidelines to a certain extent would help streamline the process so staff would know what to do,” Naghavi said.

The city already investigates residential traffic complaints when they come in and that will continue, he said, “but there is no process in place to do that.”

But Mayor Allan Mansoor said at Tuesday’s council meeting he thinks the city does a good job handling traffic requests now, and most of the solutions are costly.

“I want to be able to deliver what we tell the public we’re working on,” he said.

Councilwoman Wendy Leece and former Mayor Gary Monahan backed him up, with Monahan urging the council to halt the studies.

Monahan said the city-wide traffic calming discussion reminds him of one about the Eastside in 1997 that pitted neighborhoods against each other.

“Traffic doesn’t go away — it just gets shifted and all you’re doing is creating a problem for somebody else,” he said Wednesday.

But Monahan’s no longer on the council, and Councilman Eric Bever was absent Tuesday. With Councilwomen Katrina Foley and Linda Dixon wanting the traffic planning to continue, Mansoor didn’t have the majority he needed to kill the project.

There was a huge response to the community meeting in April, Dixon said, and “that to me indicates the community is concerned, and a stop sign is simply not going to do the job.”

Mansoor asked for the issue to be brought back at a future meeting, probably expecting Bever will vote with him and Leece.

Naghavi said he’ll continue to accept completed surveys and consider residents’ traffic complaints on a case-by-case basis.

“We will continue to provide the same high-quality service as we have,” he said.