The Greensboro City Council is set to get some bad news about speed bumps, speed humps and other traffic calming devices at the work session on Thursday, Nov. 30.

It’s scheduled to take a lot longer than councilmembers imagined.

At the July 20 City Council meeting, Councilmember Goldie Wells brought up the issue, noting that councilmembers are constantly getting requests from residents to do something to slow traffic in neighborhoods.

After the idea received support from several other city councilmembers, Mayor Nancy Vaughan said, “We want a program for speed bump, humps and traffic calming and we would like to see it, I would say 90 days at the most.”

On August 24, the City Council held a work session on speed bumps, humps and other traffic calming devices. Greensboro Department of Transportation Department (GDOT) Director Hanna Cockburn gave a presentation on traffic calming devices and said implementing them would cost about $1.7 million a year and, unlike most transportation projects, there were no federal or state matching funds available.

To back up a little further, in September 2021, at a work session, Cockburn said GDOT would start installing temporary traffic calming devices and, if they worked, they could be made permanent.

At the work session on Thursday, Nov. 30, according to the presentation, the City Council will be given a timeline on installing traffic calming devices in neighborhoods.

The timeline has the work being done to install these devices in neighborhoods in “Spring 2025.” According to the timeline, the process will start in spring 2024 with applications and screening and data collection and analysis. The summer of 2024 will be spent on “Community Engagement.” The fall of 2024, or a year from now, GDOT will spend on building consensus on projects and confirming community support. The winter of 2024 the installations will be prioritized and the projects will be delivered in the spring of 2025, and in the summer of 2025 performance will be measured.

The City Council requested action on this in September 2021, and again in July and August of this year.

Transportation projects move slowly, but imagine how long it might take to install some speed bumps in neighborhoods if it wasn’t a City Council priority.