City of Westlake Village

In our everyday travels, most of us encounter at least a few speed law violators every day. But if we examine the speeding issue just in the City of Westlake Village, will we conclude that we have a speeding problem? The answer is: yes and no.

One of the most common ways we form opinions is based on direct perception. Traffic speeding is an excellent example - we form an opinion pretty quickly when we're trying to cross a neighborhood street and a sports car whizzes by. In fact, most of us wish that traffic would drive more slowly on the street where we live. So part of the answer is yes, speeds are too high. On the other hand, we also know that our perceptions are not always accurate. Would the answer be different if we looked at it from an objective rather than a subjective perspective? Let's start with a review of our street system.

The Westlake circulation system consists of local, collector, and arterial streets. Local streets provide direct access to adjacent properties and, although they comprise the majority of City street mileage, serve the lowest traffic volumes and have the shortest trip lengths. Collector streets, such as Village Center Road, serve to funnel local street traffic to the arterial streets. The arterial streets provide relatively little access to abutting properties, but serve most of the traffic entering and leaving the City and generally carry the highest proportion of traffic mileage on the lowest proportion of street mileage. To serve the higher volumes and longer trip lengths, the arterials are designed to safely permit higher speeds than collectors or locals. Therefore, speeds on local streets should be relatively low due to the many driveways and pedestrians, and speeds on arterial streets should be relatively high to provide mobility and keep the total travel time for a typical trip reasonable.

The circulation system appears to function as intended, as indicated by radar speed measurements. Prevailing (85th percentile) speeds are consistently in the 45-50 mph range on the arterial streets and in the low to mid-30's on collector and local streets. In fact, the streets were designed to provide the curvature, slopes, and sight distance that correspond to these speeds.

Of course, the fact that 85% of the traffic travels at speeds for which the streets were designed does not necessarily mean we don't have a speeding problem - what about the other 15%? Although most of them do not really cause problems, there are always a few that do. The real purpose of establishing speed limits is to enable the Sheriff's Department to encourage (by issuing speeding tickets) the real speeders to be more consistent with the speed of the majority of motorists. With this goal, the Sheriff's Department issued 1,183 speeding citations in the City during 2007.

The real test of the City's engineering and enforcement effort, however, is the accident rate. Although collisions happen despite all efforts to prevent them, the question is how does our City compare to the average? There were 97 collisions reported in the City in 2007, of which only 19 were primarily caused by speeding. Many studies indicate that, whether measured by the number of accidents per million-vehicle-miles of travel for streets, or by the number of accidents per million entering vehicles for intersections, accident rates in the City are consistently lower (frequently much lower) than regional averages. Furthermore, the City's 2007 enforcement index (the ratio of hazardous citations and DUI arrests to injury accidents) of 80:1 is significantly higher than average, which helps explain the low accident rates.

In conclusion, speeding will remain a problem in Westlake Village as long as residents subjectively perceive it to be a problem, and efforts to enforce speed limits will continue. From an objective perspective, however, the City enjoys the relatively low accident rates and other benefits of a well planned and engineered circulation system, along with dedicated enforcement of speed laws.