A letter to the city: make traffic calming the default

Dear Mayor, City Council Members, City Manager, and Transportation staff members,

I am writing as a Charlottesville resident, pedestrian, cyclist, and driver—and as a parent of three who does not want to see my kids killed while walking and biking to school—to ask the city to make traffic calming a standing, funded, default program.

In 2024, our city recorded 625 crashes, 2 deaths, and 416 injuries (Virginia DMV, 2024). That’s way too many. Priced with NHTSA’s standard unit costs, one year of crashes in this one small city costs roughly $23–$30 million in economic terms—emergency response, medical care, courts, lost productivity—and on the order of $130–$180 million in total societal harm paid by every resident. But we do have a choice to substantially reduce this cost.

Traffic calming is the effective solution that is also startlingly cheap. From FHWA’s national compilation of contractor bid prices: a speed hump costs about $3,000 installed in today’s dollars. Imagine we are repaving a mile of a local residential street, a job on the order of $1.5–2 million by FHWA’s national cost figures; adding dense speed humps every few hundred feet along that entire mile would add only about $40,000—roughly only 2–3% of the repaving contract. The plastic posts Hoboken used to daylight its intersections are cheaper still: about $40 apiece in hardware, and even priced generously for installation, a daylighted intersection costs about as much as one speed hump.

The evidence that these tools work is clear. Studies from London, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Oakland, and Ghana all point in the same direction: physically calmed streets mean substantially fewer crashes, injuries, and deaths. The effect is especially large for crashes and injuries involving children—measured reductions in children’s pedestrian injuries cluster around 40–50%. And Hoboken, an American city of 60,000, has now gone nine consecutive years without a traffic death—a streak built on $40 posts, paint, and curb extensions, applied citywide. Even the most conservative pooled estimate in the literature (an 11% reduction in injury crashes) would repay the cost of putting speed humps on fifty miles of Charlottesville streets in under a year, counting only avoided economic losses without other positive externalities like health and climate benefits.

On travel time: the measured penalty to driving is on the order of seconds per trip, because urban journey times are dominated by intersections, not cruising speed—a trade I am sure most residents would happily make for cutting children’s injuries roughly in half. Moreover, ironically, due to the fact that journey times depend on intersections and amount of traffic (which traffic calming can reduce), it has been documented that traffic calming can speed up some journeys as well. This is not an engineering question, it is a value judgement that the city needs to make clearly. Is a minute of driving time—itself uncertain—worth nearly twice the deaths/injuries to children?

On emergency response: FHWA reports that speed cushions, designed with gaps matched to fire-truck wheel tracks, “reduce general vehicle speeds while providing little to no delay to fire vehicles,” and are being adopted in many jurisdictions precisely because of their positive reception from fire departments. A calming plan can keep full-width vertical devices off designated response routes entirely.

There is also a climate dividend. Transportation is about 30% of our city’s emissions and rising, while our budgeted climate programs buy small reductions at stiff cost. The mode shift that follows calmer streets removes carbon as a free byproduct—by my estimate, plausibly way more tons per year than the programs the city actually budgets as climate action. A city that calms its streets gets a free climate program—and one that removes more carbon than the programs it actually budgets.

For scale: this region is currently advancing roughly $24.5 million in Smart Scale applications to extend two highway ramps at the US 29/250 interchange—money that would buy some 8,000 installed speed humps, enough to calm 600 miles of street. And the scale is not unique to state projects: the city’s own Belmont Bridge replacement came in over $31 million, and the West Main streetscape plan had grown to about $50 million before it was canceled. A fraction of any one such project would fund traffic calming for essentially every residential street in Charlottesville.

I ask the city to:

1. Stand up a citywide daylighting program now. This is the rare safety measure that does not need a lot of planning, engineering, and other processes—just cheap plastic posts and a work crew. At a couple hundred dollars per intersection in materials, daylighting residential street intersections will be a rounding error in the infrastructure budget, will save lives, and it can start right now. Hoboken started exactly this way to achieve its Vision Zero goal.
2. Pass a Safe Streets Ordinance that requires traffic calming as the bare-minimum standard for residential streets, in the spirit of Cambridge’s Cycling Safety Ordinance and Somerville’s Safe Streets Ordinance: every residential street the city repaves or rebuilds should come back calmed. Given the massive positive effect and marginal cost of traffic calming, the burden of justification should flip—an uncalmed street should be the hard exception that engineering staff must justify.
3. Create a standing traffic-calming program. A standing program also builds in-house expertise, and expertise compounds: devices bought and mechanically installed twenty at a time through standard process cost far less than one-off retrofits with their own planning process, so every year of the program makes the next year cheaper.

Residents should not have to beg for safety of their children right outside their own front doors, and I believe that the city should not leave one of its cheapest (which will likely save more money than invested), highest-return public-safety investments unfunded. I have compiled the full evidence base, with primary sources, here:

• https://yyahn.com/wiki/Traffic-calming-works/ — the evidence that calming reduces deaths and injuries
• https://yyahn.com/wiki/Traffic-calming-is-cheap/ — the cost-benefit accounting summarized above

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, YY Ahn