Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program
The primary goals of the program are to increase safety and comfort of travel by all modes and promote pedestrian, bicycle, and transit use. These goals reference and strengthen the City’s Mobility Principles.
The objectives, in order to meet these goals, include: reducing motorists speeds and/or volumes to increase safety, inducing compliance from motorists, and provide traffic control that is self-enforcing, reducing the need for police intervention.
What Traffic Calming Is:
Different types of traffic calming are appropriate on different types of streets – most often it involves physical safety improvements such as speed humps, speed cushions, speed tables, raised crosswalks, pedestrian islands, traffic circles, changes to lane widths, chicanes, etc. These measures have been proven to reduce speeding and increase safety. Typically, speed humps, speed cushions, and speed tables are the most common traffic calming measures on our streets given their effectiveness in managing vehicular speeds, but other measures can be proposed if they are deemed more effective on a given street.
What Traffic Calming Isn't:
The City’s Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program focuses on lower-cost measures effective at slowing vehicular speeds and/or volumes on residential streets. The program does not consider larger-scale solutions to traffic congestion nor speeding on higher-volume arterial streets. Instead, the Neighborhood Traffic Calming program is a community-driven, block-by-block solution to address speeding on local, residential streets.
In addition, traffic calming does not include the use of regulatory measures such as stop signs. Stop signs designate right-of-way for drivers at intersections and can only be installed if certain warrants are met. DOMI gives careful consideration to the installation of stop signs as they are frequently ignored if not warranted. Unlike traffic signals or stop signs at intersections, which do not reduce mid-block speeds, traffic calming measures encourage slower vehicular speed along the length of a block rather than at intersections.
If you have traffic-related or pedestrian safety issues at a particular intersection, these concerns are best communicated with the DOMI through the city’s 311 system.
Eligibility and Prioritization
To be considered a potential project under the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program, a street first must have first passed DOMI’s initial Eligibility Screen and Prioritization Matrix. For more detailed information on these items as well as the review process and timeline, please see the City webpage here: https://pittsburghpa.gov/domi/traffic-calming
Current Projects
The following locations have passed the Department’s initial Eligibility Screen, been evaluated for engineering criteria, and prioritized based on an engineering/safety score.
Please click on the individual project pages for more detailed information on each project.
(Individual Project Pages will be updated as they progress):
2023 Current Projects
2023 Completed Projects
Morningside Neighborhood Traffic Calming
Lemington Avenue Traffic Calming
North Charles Street Traffic Calming
