Out-of-town residents coming down Eighth Avenue in Decatur may want to slow down after the Board of Aldermen heard complaints from a concerned citizen about speeders driving unsafely through city streets.
Candy Babson, a resident of Eighth Avenue in Decatur, told the board this was not the first time she had raised the issue with the town.
“I brought this to the board in June, July 2014 asking for speed bumps,” she said, adding that was when her cat had been run over, breaking its leg.
The board declined her request, citing concerns the town might be liable for damaged vehicles, Babson said. Now, she said, the problem is getting worse and the town needs to take action.
“What’s going to happen, if nobody does anything and we just roll along like we have been, it’s going to be a death suit,” she said. “And that’s going to be a lot more than two or three thousand in car repairs.”
Much of the issue, Babson said, county residents bring their children to school in the morning. While the speed limit outside the city limits is 55 miles per hour, the speed decreases to 35 miles per hour in town.
Mayor David Marshall said the town had addressed a similar issue on West Broad Street not too long ago. There, he said, they installed rumble strips across the road to alert motorists to slow down.
“It wouldn’t be a problem to do something like that,” he said.
However, installing rumble strips would take some planning, Marshall explained. The strips, while effective, are quite noisy, and the town would need to plan out where to place them so traffic doesn’t disturb residents.
“We did have a couple of complaints right after we put them in,” he said. “We tried to put them in areas where it wasn’t near anyone’s bedroom. It’s kind of tricky to be able to do that, but we do take that into consideration.”
Babson said ideally she’d like to install tire shredders in the streets, “like James Bond;” however, she’d settle for increased police presence and ticketing the speeders.
“I’d love to have that push button with the tire shredders, but that’s not realistic. That’s only in the movies,” she said. “So what can we do? More of police presence, and ticketing. Not just warnings, because when you have to scratch out a check, you slow down because you don’t want to do it again.”
Decatur Police Chief Clay Garvin said he would make sure his officers paid attention to the area.
“I’ll make sure we have officers down there, more of a presence,” he said.
