Jul 26, 2017 By Harry Funk 3 min read

Speed humps are not coming to Peters Township’s Bower Hill Road any time soon.

At its July 24 meeting, township council voted against implementing the first phase of a traffic-calming plan calling for the installation of two raised areas of pavement surface near Bower Hill’s intersection with Ivy Lane.

Council, though, did approve a three-way stop at Bower Hill and Snyder roads, to improve line-of-sight issues.

Proposed were larger, more gradual speed humps known as “Gwinnett County speed tables,” similar to the traffic-calming features present in several spots on Thompsonville Road. Speed bumps, by contrast, are designed to bring traffic nearly to a halt, in such places as parking lots and garages.

Either way, council members were none too enthusiastic about bringing them to Bower Hill.

“It’s been my observation that you get some reduction of speed at the speed hump,” Councilman David Ball said. “But after that, back to normal.”

Walnut Drive resident Michael Grasso, whose property abuts Bower Hill Road, also expressed opposition.

“We were noticing when the temporary speed bumps were put in last year, a lot of people were laying on their horns or actually accelerating more aggressively when they went over the bump,” he told council. And if the raised pavement would be in place permanently: “I’m going over these speed bumps eight, nine, 10 times a day. It will wear on my cars after a while.”

The plan that council rejected had been recommended by the township’s Traffic Calming Committee, which held a May 10 open house to present the proposal to the public. The committee then sent ballots to 137 homes in the local area, to be returned by June 30, asking whether residents supported the plan.

At the deadline, the township had received 74 ballots, or 54 percent of those distributed. Of those, 39 were in favor and 35 opposed.

“When you do all the math, it’s really somewhere around 28 percent of the people saying, go ahead with this project,” township manager Paul Lauer pointed out, “and almost half of the people being ambivalent in one way or another about the voting.”

The plan will be sent back to the committee for further consideration.

“We need to do something up there,” Frank Arcuri, council chairman, acknowledged.

According to assistant township manager Ryan Jeroski’s memo to council, traffic counts conducted on Bower Hill Road in the spring of 2015 showed an 85th-percentile speed of 38 mph, or 13 mph over the speed limit. The percentile represents the speed on a road at or below which 85 percent of the motor vehicles travel.