The city council in this Silicon Valley city adopted a comprehensive program for traffic calming in 1997 after years of resisting calls for speed humps or diverters. We've typically taken the more traditional approach that the streets are there to be driven on. If there is spillover into a residential area, for example, it might mean an arterial or collector road needs to be unclogged, he says. Moving traffic in and out is crucial to Sunnyvale, which boasts a population of 130,000 and jobs for 150,000.
Workers stream to and from the computer chip industries each day.
The city did not allow traffic calming devices such as road humps or diverters. Now the council has adopted a process for permitting those devices to give its engineering department another tool, but one to be used sparingly. Williamson says the city wanted to set high standards for citizen involvement. Those that are real failures have almost always resulted from a situation where the city was responding to a petition by 20 to 50 people and they thought that was the pulse of the neighborhood. They installed speed humps or something and then found out the whole neighborhood didn't like it at all.