That the City Council:

A.  Receive and file the results of the City's initial completed Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP); and

B.  Consider and approve proposed NTMP changes; and,

C.  Approve the renewal of an updated and revised NTMP.

In 2006, the City Council adopted a Council Policy establishing the City of La Habra Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP). The NTMP is a citywide initiative that outlined a process where residents could request their neighborhoods be evaluated for traffic safety related issues, such as speeding and cut-through traffic, and then participate in a process to consider and request certain traffic calming tools and mechanisms, such as signage, speed lumps and markings. After the completion of a pilot NTMP process in two neighborhoods, the City Council adopted the initial NTMP priority list that included 15 specific neighborhoods that would be considered for traffic-calming treatments. These neighborhoods were ranked based on traffic speeds, traffic volumes, and 3-year accident history (Attachment 2).

Since the launching of the original NTMP, the City has processed a total of sixteen (16) neighborhoods through the program. Four (4) of these neighborhoods (‘W’, ‘Y’ ‘Alpha’, and ‘Delta’) were completed in 2006 as part of the first phase of the NTMP and the rest of the neighborhoods continued being processed over the following years. After reviewing the traffic statistics collected in these neighborhoods, both before and after NTMP treatments were applied, it is clear that NTMP improvements completed in most of those participating neighborhoods proved to be successful. For those neighborhoods that approved traffic calming treatments, there was a decrease in average vehicle speeds of 5 miles per hour (mph) and an eight (8) percent reduction in average daily traffic (ADT) volumes. (Attachment 3) The following are illustrations of the results of the before and after study:
 


Although the NTMP appears to have been a success and has achieved some of the goals of improving traffic safety in residential neighborhoods, staff recognized the need to develop and propose certain streamlined and simplified processes should the City Council wish to renew the NTMP and add new neighborhoods considered for future traffic calming.

In the original NTMP, each year staff would contact residents from three of the neighborhoods on the previously established priority list. An initial neighborhood meeting would then be scheduled where staff, the City's traffic engineering consultant, and all residents from that neighborhood were invited to discuss the traffic concerns in that area and learn how the NTMP process would work. The purpose of the first meeting was to explain the NTMP's goals and objectives and ultimately form a Neighborhood Traffic Committee (NTC) consisting of at least ten (10) members of that neighborhood who would represent the entire neighborhood. The NTC members were provided information regarding traffic and speed in their neighborhoods, provided samples of traffic calming tools and options, and were asked to make recommendations as to what traffic-calming features they felt would be most beneficial for their particular neighborhood. After the initial meeting, there would be three more meetings with the NTC, City staff, the City's traffic consultant to further refine and develop a draft traffic-calming plan to present to all households in that neighborhood. After a draft plan was developed, a final meeting would then be held with City staff, the City's traffic consultant, and all residents in that neighborhood to review the draft plan and determine if the residents in that neighborhood felt that the plan sufficiently addressed their concerns. If there were no more concerns raised, a ballot was then sent out to each household within that neighborhood asking them to either approve or reject the proposed draft traffic-calming plan. If enough responses were received and there was sufficient support in favor of the draft traffic-calming plan, staff would then present the neighborhood approved draft traffic-calming plan to the City Council for consideration. If approved by Council, staff then proceeded with construction and implementation of the final plan.

After evaluating this original NTMP process staff found that, on average, the entire process from initial neighborhood contact to final construction took as much as three years and a significant amount of time from staff, residents, and consultants. As staff has worked through the current NTMP process over the years, and based on feedback received from many of the residents who participated in the program, staff realized that the current NTMP process is overly cumbersome, requires an excessive amount of participation from residents in participating neighborhoods, can be unnecessarily costly, and takes far too long to complete.

It should be noted that three of the original neighborhoods in the program did not receive any traffic calming at all due, in part, to the high voting threshold required in order for a draft plan to be approved by residents in a participating neighborhood. In the current NTMP, in order for a proposed traffic calming plan to move forward to Council for review and approval, a minimum of 50% of all surveys had to be returned to the City, with 67% of residents voting in those returned surveys indicating approval of the plan. This required residents on the NTC’s to canvass their neighbors and encourage them to vote, which was not always successful. Furthermore, in some cases neighbors had significant disagreements about which traffic calming treatments, if any, their neighborhood should get. In a few cases, this resulted in no consensus being formed and no plan being approved, despite several years of effort and work.

Since its adoption in 2006, the NTMP process has remained largely unchanged, but as City staff worked through the original 15 identified neighborhoods, residents in other neighborhoods learned of the program and were interested in being included in future rounds of NTMP. The City has received many inquiries about residential neighborhood traffic-calming and today there are thirty (32) open requests and petitions from residents to have their neighborhoods included in a new NTMP round. Due to this increased interest, and now understanding how long the original NTMP process took to complete, staff recognizes there is a need to significantly overhaul and streamline the program and process if Council wishes to reauthorize a new round of NTMP construction. 
 
In November 2022, staff retained the Interwest Group to perform a comprehensive review of the original NTMP and Council Policy. Due to the increase in the number of vehicles on the road throughout the region, increased traffic congestion, and more advanced navigation technologies such as Google maps and Waze that often recommend vehicle routing onto smaller residential streets to bypass traffic congestion, more residents in La Habra are requesting the City's assistance to evaluate and provide traffic-calming devices in their neighborhoods. The goal of the proposed updated NTMP is to better serve the City's residents by revising the program to allow a faster, more efficient and more cost effective process to address neighborhood traffic-calming needs. As a result of the comprehensive review of the current NTMP, as well as industry standards and best practices, staff in conjunction with the consultant have formulated a number of recommended NTMP revisions for City Council consideration and approval if the City Council wishes to approve a new round of NTMP construction.

Major recommendations include:

Traffic Data Thresholds:

The total cost of NTMP traffic calming improvements made since 2006 to all of the original participating neighborhoods that had approved plans submitted for Council final approval totaled $1,110,545, which averages to $79,324 per completed neighborhood.

Approval of an updated NTMP process and policy will not have a direct budget impact at this time; however, if approved for renewal and implemented, staff will provide a budget for City Council review and approval starting in FY 25/26. When the City first implemented the original NTMP, staff budgeting $150,000 each year from General Capital CIP funds for engineering, construction and implementation costs for three neighborhoods. Due to higher labor and material costs associated with construction costs today, it is unclear whether this same amount of annual funding will be sufficient in future years to complete three neighborhoods at a time. Staff will provide updated cost estimates once the new cycle of NTMP begins next fiscal year, if the updated NTMP is approved by Council.