Deer Lake -
There are more than a few side streets where the residents are concerned about vehicles travelling too fast. Phyllis Bailey lives on a side street off Nicholsville Road where she said a lot of cars zoom by frequently.
"(The cars) were crazy and there were kids playing, and I used to say to my husband, 'Don't they realize to slow down. Kids are playing, and it's just too fast,'" Bailey said.
She said the speed limit signs should be posted on the side streets.
"I don't know why those speeds are not posted," she said. "People don't know then what the speed limit is. There's a sign on the main road posted as 50. There should be a sign at the beginning of the street or somewhere so people could know what the speed is."
At a Deer Lake council meeting Monday, councillors and town officials also appeared to be confused as to the correct speed limits on the streets in their community.
Town manager Maxine Hayden said she was aware of the lack of signage off Nicholsville Road.
"The problem arises on Nicholsville Road when you're going over now it's 50, then going off on all those side roads it's 50," she said. "But they're not posted. We'd have to get signs for every street."
The town's superintendent, David Thomas, said the individual roads off streets marked as 50 km/h would be considered as the same speed limit.
"The main streets are 50 so if there's no signs posted then all these streets as well will be 50," he said.
Other streets with similar situations were brought up at council, such as Goose Arm Road and George Aaron Drive which are posted as 50 km/h and Chapel Hill Road which is in a 40 km/h zone even though there are no signs on Chapel Hill to illustrate the limit.
At Monday's meeting, Coun. Sheila Mercer said she understood how it could put an officer in a difficult situation when distributing speeding tickets.
"Someone could get involved in a messy dispute over a ticket in a situation like that, it kind of undermines your credibility of giving tickets," she said.
Cpl. Henry Poswiata of RCMP Traffic Services West set the matter straight.
Poswiata said the speed limit for the town of Deer Lake on all streets is 40 km/h unless otherwise marked. Poswiata said he would be very surprised if each street would have to be signed, especially when it comes to ticket enforcement.
"If you issue a ticket to an area on a particular street, you don't have to go in and say that a sign was posted on that road," he said. "You go into the court and say the speed limit in the town of Deer Lake is 40 km/h unless otherwise posted, and on the street I was doing the enforcing on, there was no signs posted to indicate the speed was anything other than 40 km/h."
Examples of areas where speed limits differ than the apparently steady 40 km/h include school zones where the speed limit drops to 25 km/h and part of Nicholsville Road where the limit is 50 km/h.
Town police officer, Terrance Barnes said he's heard many different excuses for speeding and that lack of signage is one of them.
"People use 'It was 50 km/h back there' as their argument. You come off the highway and you didn't see a sign and highway speed is 100, so you're allowed to do 100, right? Come on now. Common sense is the first thing to survival."
Barnes seemed to support and increase in signage however.
"The town is looking at our signage and what we need to do," Barnes said. "Do we really need to put one speed everywhere, or can we afford to put different speed on the side roads versus some of our main thoroughfares. The law is 40, but most of us are firm believers that if it's not there, how do we know it."
