Ideas about reducing residential speeding?

We live three houses away from a middle school. Our street does not have a speed limit sign, but most of our traffic feeds off of a 30 mph street. The other streets around the school have a 25 mph speed limit. I measured it off of Google Maps, and from entry off of the 30 mph street to it's end (with a stop sign) it is 900 feet.

You would not believe the speed these people get up to going by our house, which is 600 feet away from the entry of the 30 mph road. 

I can't think of any reasonable solution to this other than speed "humps." I can prove what maximum or average speeds were over a semester with a camera, but any other ideas?

I've lived here almost 12 years. Wow, have the speeds increased over the years due to faster cars and better NVH.

One guy (edit: on the news) threw a driveshaft at a car once. Went right through the windshield and killed the driver. Don't do that.

Buy your own , 25 mph sign and maybe add Radar enforced....

or at least 25mph school zone ahead, 

Probably someone on EBay has a used sign...

But really the city should be doing it , or have the PTA make some noise!

Good luck

The industry phrase is "traffic calming".  Here -> Link is a good resource to explore options.

Speed bumps are the best government response, but "speed dips" are just as effective and are DIY.

Realistically though, a lot could be done to reduce speed through better design. Drivers naturally slow down on narrower roads, for example. So maybe designated parking areas with curbs that go in and out (changing width) for example. 

Another thing is visibility, good visibility means drivers feel safe and therefore they go fast. It's counterintuitive, but sometimes some stuff blocking some sightlines can improve safety.

My subdivision is 25mph and we are up to 3 trees and 2 brick mailboxes "high" speed accidents.  We are on the "outside" side of a curve and people FLY around the corner and wreck.  

Years ago a car hit the tree across from my house and the guy couldn't straighten so he left it for me to look at the past 15 years. 

Good luck as we've had no success.

Contact the local enforcement agency.

 Buy a black and white P71.  Park on the street

John Welsh said:

 Buy a black and white P71.  Park on the street

Put a couple of dummy officers in it.

Park on the street

This sits on a popular 2 lane road around here and even though I know it is there it still causes me to "brake check" some times.  
The funny thing is the Durango is actually navy blue, not black but you're too close to it and have already slowed when you actually notice the color.  

If not making your own fake cop car, how about making your own fake speeding camera?  

Real speed camera samples:

Go out to Ebay and get some '90's, big security camera ($40).  Mount it to a telephone pole and attach a 25 mph speed limit sign ($26) to the same pole.

New fake camera housing priced 2 for $45 complete with bracket (one for each side of the road!)

You need a few neighbors that are handy and quick on their feet.

You need a few pairs of these: https://www.amazon.com/VEVOR-Rubber-Speed-Bump-72-8/dp/B09MFK5KDS/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=speed+bumps&qid=1677634023&sr=8-3&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.304cacc1-b508-45fb-a37f-a2c47c48c32f

You need a few impact drivers, concrete bolts, and a late night with no traffic. Install the bumps quickly and then shut up. It will likely take the local government weeks or months to remove them.

Alternate method: buy a few 1970s barges and park them on the street in an alternative pattern. Makes a nice chicane and the 5mph steel bumpers should take a hit nicely.

These and markers like them are officially called lane delineators. 

Relatively near my house but on my regular travel route there is a place where I feel these are highly needed.  The need is to keep people making left turns in and out of a specific gas station. Its a really bad intersection and many attempting the left turn are tourists not familiar with the danger.  

Really, I have gone to a meeting and made a formal request for them.  I've had some bad close calls at the intersection.  

I tell my wife, and true, I have highly considered just putting them in myself!  The gas station would be super pissed but I think it would take forever for the posts to be removed because of uncertainty of who ordered them.  The township would think it was the county.  The county would think it was the state.  I bet it would take them forever to actually talk to each other.  

Best of all, I could install them in broad daylight and never be questioned...because of The Gov't Mule.  Imagine me and truck out there while wearing a high-viz vest. 

Caltrops.

VolvoHeretic said:

John Welsh said:

 Buy a black and white P71.  Park on the street

Put a couple of dummy officers in it.

In lot's of cases, dummy is a redundant word.

I had to water the grass on a city lot for three months last summer from a metered fire hydrant. I built this 2x4 protector for a 1" black vinyl hose that crossed a back road in a deserted neighborhood in a floodway green zone the city is building. The first day, every car that used that road for the morning commute flew over it at about 35 mph in a 25. They never did it twice and slowed down to a crawl the rest of the summer. I did remove it at night and weekends when not in use.

I have created a chicane on my street with my cars.  It's funny, and gratifying, but not a long term solution. 

We have a 25 mph limit through our semi-rural neighborhood.  Most homes are on acreage and set back for the road.  MS. Frog was the HOA president.  Folks keep screaming that "everybody is speeding" to get home.   We ran some demonstration tests.  With cars driving by at 25 mph while folks sat on their front porches.  The spectators swore all the cars were speeding.  They weren't.

In some situations 25 looks fast, even though it isn't.    Just saying.    YMMV

VolvoHeretic said:

John Welsh said:

 Buy a black and white P71.  Park on the street

Put a couple of dummy officers in it.

Maryland tried that for years on I-95. 99 people out of 100 blew straight past the car without slowing and the other person pulled over to try to resuscitate the officer in distress.

I liv on a street with an elementary on one end and a middle school on the other. Folks tend to fly down the street, especially to do middle school dropoff in the mornings. We worked with the city and found that the road itself is really wide, with great sightlines. As a poster says above, that combo creates the feeling of a road where it's safe to go fast.

We ended up putting in curb bumpouts at all the crosswalks on the street. Basically it narrows the street so that it looks like two cars cannot fit at the same time (they can, but our lizard brains don't think it's safe at 25+ mph). You can also plant street trees in the extension.

Neighbors went nuts when they first went in and said it was dangerous and that it would cause a head-on crash but years later and it's like they've always been there. They do work, in two ways - 1) cars slow down on approach, and 2) people at the crosswalk are closer to the road and not hidden by parked cars. 

Speed humps can have unintended consequences.

Way way back when I was building office buildings, the office park had a couple of holdouts right at the end of the entrance road that wouldn't sell for whatever reason. Proud of being the last house on what was the city dump I guess. They complained a berkeley load about people speeding past their house despite it being right next to the red light, while turning down offers WAY above value for the property just to get them out of the way.

They started putting their vehicles in the road, township towed them. So they petitioned and fought and got speed humps put in. Less than a month later they were petitioning to get rid of them because of all the car parts winding up in their yard. 12-15 years later, the humps are still there and the people are still there complaining about it. 

Not saying "move" just saying the law of unintended consequences can come into play. 

Complain to the city. Often. Eventually they will send officers to ticket speeders.  The main road near me is 25 MPH but drivers often do double that since it's a wide open road with full-width shoulders and a center turn lane - so 25 feels like crawling.  I usually slow down to 30 and have had drivers get pissed and go around me.  Every now and then, the twp will put police in the shopping center parking lot and start nailing drivers.  A week or so of regular patrolling will usually keep speeds tolerable for a month or so. 

Part of the street was renovated similar to the above with expanded walk ways and islands in the middle.  That part of the street has much lower traffic speeds. But that was done as part of a train station renovation, so it's hard to say when the budget will be available to expand that to the edge of town. 

People generally drive as fast as they feel is comfortable in the environment. Posted speed limits don't do much to change this.

What slows people down is making the space feel more constricted:

• Narrower lanes
• Lane shifts
• Uneven surfaces
• Large objects (e.g. trees, walls, garbage cans, equipment) close to the road.

I'd lift some ideas from like... Feng Shui. It's not all touchy-feely but also practical psychology.

Create a portal that clearly delineates that you are changing spaces. This is the purpose of those gates that just sort of... stand there... in Japanese garden design. They also commonly put a different ground covering under those gates - differently sized gravel or something. Something that tells as many senses as possible that you're changing locations - sight, feel, and sound.

Walls or a false gate entering the neighborhood could serve this purpose. Then something that creates noise and vibration when driving over it, but doesn't necessarily force a car to slow. Like some rumble strips or something rather than a full on speed bump.

Having dealt with this myself I can say with confidence that there is nothing you can do. There's nothing anyone else will do.

Ive had words with my a-hole neighbors that go 50mph on my 25mph side street while my kids are out on their bikes. It didn't help anything. Most people are so offended that I flag them to slow down. Except the legend of a UPS driver who saw me flag to slow down and now he drives through the neighborhood like a saint.