As the City Council approved a plan last week to cut in half the speed limit on the President Streets, a local resident is waging a campaign to reduce the speed limit on all side streets to 20 miles per hour.
Shore Road resident Michele Reinbach said statistics show that the chances of someone getting killed in a car accident are greatly reduced at a speed of 20 MPH.
“I’m just trying to save lives,” said Reinbach, chairperson of the city’s Public Safety Commission. “It’s all about having respect for human life. We need to respect people’s lives. Do they have to suffer a personal tragedy to have their eyes opened?”
Touting her “20 is Plenty Campaign,” Reinbach said she would bring it up at the City Council meeting and take direction about where she should go from there.
“It makes a difference,” she said. “If someone is hit by a car [at 20 MPH], they are probably not going to die. It’s a no-brainer.”
State lawmakers recently passed legislation to allow city officials to reduce the speed limit from 30 MPH to 15 MPH on the President Streets. As a result, on Sept. 19 the council approved reducing the speed limit on Cleveland, Harding, Mitchell, Belmont, Atlantic, Coolidge, Wilson and Taft avenues. The ordinance took effect immediately.
Sgt. Eric Cregeen, a spokesman for the Long Beach Police Department, called it a smart move to reduce the speed limit on these streets.
“Those are narrow streets on the President Streets, and certainly if you drop the speed down to 15 MPH, it would ensure the safety of residents,” Cregeen said.
The speed limit is 30 MPH all throughout Long Beach, except for county-owned roads such as on Long Beach Boulevard, north of Park Avenue, and on East Park Avenue, east of Long Beach Boulevard, where the speed limit is 35 MPH.
“It’s up to the City Council,” Cregeen said. “Whatever speed limit they decide to set, we’ll enforce.”
He said traffic enforcement police officers are stationed throughout the city with radar guns in an attempt to catch speeders.
“I’m out there every day and see people speeding on Park Avenue and we’re doing everything we can to stop that,” Cregeen said about motorists who use Long Beach as a cut-through to get to one end of the barrier island to another. “We’ve got a couple of guys out there who are so dedicated to slow these people down day in and day out that they are writing books of summonses.”
Cregeen could not immediately say how many summonses have been written in the past year, but added that scofflaws will receive a $180 ticket for going up to 10 miles over the speed limit.
Reinbach said she first got involved with traffic law issues when her neighbor, 37-year-old Kate Rose-Eichin, a mother of two young children, was killed as she stepped out of her car on Shore Road, between Lincoln and Franklin boulevards, on June 11, 2010. Reinbach said it took two years after the accident for the city to lower the speed limit on the President Streets.
Reinbach said she could either launch a petition drive or lobby in Albany for the 20 MPH speed limit on all side streets. “We will do what we need to do,” she said. “We’re
not going to wait two years for this to happen. I feel very strongly about that.”
In addition, she said Sen. Eric Adams of Park Slope, Brooklyn is proposing similar speed limit reductions for his neighborhood in January and Reinbach is hoping to “piggyback off that.”
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.
