These are the top ten speeds on Pleasant Park from March 1 to May 31, 2020:

100 km/hr
96 km/hr
96 km/hr
96 km/hr
95 km/hr
90 km/hr
92 km/hr
90 km/hr
90 km/hr
89 km/hr

Pleasant Park is a neighbourhood collector/school zone with a 50km/hr speed limit. These speeds are outrageous.

So why are drivers going this fast? One look at the street and you can guess why. It's because they can.

Road design influences driver behaviour. Wide, straight, and flat roads allow and encourage drivers to go fast. This is why highways are designed this way. Residential roads shouldn't be. It's simply too easy to speed here as it's designed.

Pleasant Park needs a safer design for all road users and traffic calming measures to make speeding like this impossible. This should involve sidewalks, cycletracks, and raised intersections. Being in a school zone, it should also have photo radar to penalize drivers who speed.

In 2019, the City of Ottawa approved new Traffic Calming Guidelines: https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/documents/files/traffic_calm_design_guide_en.pdf
And new guidelines for Designing Neighbourhood Collectors: https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/documents/files/designing_neighbourhood_collector_streets_en.pdf

They know how to fix the problem.

And the problem isn't new. In this article from 2017, a resident described speeds "as high as 80 or 90." Councillor Cloutier added speedboards and distributed "slow down for us" signs. All the speedboards did was record the issue. The signs were ignored. https://www.bramptonguardian.com/news-story/7932919-residents-urge-city-to-crack-down-on-chronic-pleasant-park-speeders-coasters/

Speeding like this—up to 100km/hr—is dangerous. They increase the likelihood that someone will be struck by a car, and killed when that happens. The fact that not enough has been done by the City to combat a known speeding issue after years of warnings is negligent.

Pleasant Park is a street with schools, parks, multi-use pathway crossings, an allotment garden, houses, and businesses. It's a popular place to walk or ride a bike. The current road design that allows this type of speeding can't continue.

The street is currently in the planning stages to become a "neighbourhood bikeway" with shared lanes and painted sharrows. Would you want to share the road with 100km/hr motor traffic? That's the speed limit on the 417! Nobody would be safe riding on the 417, even with sharrows.

Pleasant Park needs immediate changes, and the upcoming neighbourhood bikeway project is a good opportunity to make the road safer for all road users. Shared lanes with painted bike icons on the road won't cut it on a dangerous, high-speed road like this one.

FWIW, it wasn't easy to get this data. The Councillor's office declined to send it to me in June, saying top speeds are misleading, that people will always speed, and that the high numbers could be from paramedic vehicles. I continued to ask, and finally received the data today.

Data like this should be open by default.

(By the way, I reached out to the paramedic services. They told me their policy is "a maximum speed differential of 40km ... if there is stationary or no traffic in the area – or a speed of 90km/hr [in a 50km/hr zone]”. So it's very unlikely these speeds were caused by them.)

As another aside, I wasn't able to get data from all three speedboards on Pleasant Park because one of them was stolen this summer! Apparently drivers don't like having their speeds measured here. https://twitter.com/jordobicycles/status/1282686641098940418?s=20

We have to accept that speeding happens because we let it happen. People only drive 100km/hr on residential roads because they can—because of bad road design. We need to build our streets so that the types of speeds recorded on Pleasant Park aren't achievable.