Denare Beach drivers apparently have the need for speed and the village wants them to slow down. The Northern Village of Denare Beach ran a speed radar sign earlier this summer on Spruce Street, discovering of the 6,507 cars that passed by the sign, over 1,900 of them were speeding.
Denare Beach’s municipal speed limit is 40 kilometres per hour. Creighton and Flin Flon have speed limits of 50 kilometres per hour.
Meredith Norman is the chief administrative officer for the village and said that the sign was in “stealth mode” to see how bad the speeding problem was. The sign tracked speeds but did not display to drivers how fast they were going. The sign is now showing drivers their speed.
“We have received a lot of complaints from residents about people speeding throughout the community. So we had applied for a Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) grant to purchase the speed sign,” she said.
“We've taken it out of stealth mode and now it displays the speed, so we're hoping with the speed being displayed that when we pull the report next time we'll see a reduction in speeders throughout that area.”
Norman also said the data was valuable to share with the RCMP, so they know what time most speeding happens.
The fastest driver was clocked by the sign going 70 kilometres per hour.
“We did have a few speeders through there that were between 66 and 70 kilometers per hour, so they're nearly doubling the speed limit,” Norman said.
“It's a busy street with lots of kids and especially in the summer, kids out there playing and riding their bikes and people walking their pets.”
While the high outlier numbers concerned Norman, she thinks most speeders are just losing track of their speed on Spruce Street.
“I knew people were speeding, I didn't think it was that high,” she said.
“I think for a majority of those people that were speeding, probably once the sign displays their speed, they'll slow down. The majority of speeders, were up to 45 kilometers per hour. So they weren't really speeding too badly, which was nice to see.”
Norman pointed to a couple reasons why Denare Beach needed a slower speed limit.
“We don't have far to go and we're out here so there's no real reason to increase speed limits,” she said.
“We don't have sidewalks or like a specific space for pedestrians to walk. We share the road with our pedestrians out here. So we'd like to keep it down so that when we have our kids walking to the store or people walking their pets, they're not getting pushed off the road by cars.”
Norman said the sign will be moved around to track other areas of town after the data from Spruce Street with the display on is collected.
