PUSLINCH – A group of residents who live on Maltby Road in Puslinch have joined forces to ask council to do something about the volume of traffic on their rural road.
Joined by 35 of the 70 families that live along Maltby, many showed up to support the newly-formed Maltby Community Association asking for additional traffic mitigating measures during their delegation to council Wednesday afternoon.
“As residents, we’ve taken things into our hands as much as possible,” said Robert Vosburgh, who delegated for the group. “We need something that stops drivers from seeing a newly paved road as a chance to go that much faster.”
Forming the boundary between Guelph and Puslinch, Vosburgh claims that traffic volumes on Maltby have gone from a vehicle every 15 to 30 minutes to every 5 to 10 seconds.
With new developments on the horizon, the group is concerned that Maltby is “rapidly” becoming a commuter road as drivers try to avoid traffic backlogs on their way into Guelph.
“Most of us who used to walk, jog, or ride our bikes on Maltby don’t dare try that anymore,” said Vosburgh. “It’s simply too risky.”
While the road has a 60km/h speed limit, the group alleges that many do more than 100km/h.
“Sitting in my house and looking out at the road it’s like a racetrack out there,” said Bill Harrison, another delegate. “This community is growing very very rapidly and we’re all going to have to adapt and change.”
New stops were recently installed at two intersections along Maltby but the group is asking for narrowed lanes, speed humps, and speed radars to address what’s happening between traffic lights.
“Our goal is to be a positive voice for our community and our members are united in their concerns for road safety,” said Vosburgh. “Road safety is about resident safety and it should be high on your priority list.”
During the meeting, councilors were unanimous in their support for all aspects of the proposal outside of the speed humps but made a point of clarifying the traffic seems to be an issue county-wide.
“I’m 100 per cent supportive of this because that is putting the cost of speeding on the speeder,” said Mayor James Seeley. “Everybody is willing to drive slow in front of their own home but we need everyone to drive slow in front of their neighbours house too.”
Township staff will report back about the cost of speed mitigating measures at a feature meeting in August or September.
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
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