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Tired of cars speeding down the street past your house? Sick of too much traffic using your street as a shortcut that it was never designed for? Who you gonna call? Speed busters also known as the folks at Oakley City Hall in charge of the new Neighborhood Traffic Management Program.

The plan was adopted last week by the City Council, allowing more than $100,000 to be spent in the coming year to help slow traffic on neighborhood streets that are currently unsafe for children and other living things.

City staff receives complaints on a regular basis that cars are being driven through neighborhoods in a manner not compatible with the quality of life that is expected, wrote City Engineer Jason Vogan in a staff report. Issues range from excessive speeding, too high of a volume or people using streets as shortcuts, to name a few.

The traffic calming measures might be as simple as putting up signs or restriping the lanes to make them narrower to more involved measures such as putting in speed bumps, lumps, cushions, tables, raised crosswalks, neckdowns, chokers and bulbouts to major projects such as creating traffic circles and roundabouts. New housing developments will be required to incorporate traffic calming mechanisms at no cost to the city.

In a workshop meeting last December, the council OK'd those measures but turned thumbs down on more extreme measures, such as instituting public traffic classes, pedestrian sting operations, juvenile traffic school programs and residential speed watch programs. They also want the slowing measures to be used only on neighborhood streets, not on main thoroughfares.

At the Aug. 12 council meeting, Vogan presented a 100-page traffic consultant's report that details the new program. It requires residents to fill out a request form specifying the problem and providing the signatures of 10 neighbors who are also concerned. City staff will then collect traffic data, rank the various requests, develop a traffic calming plan, hold a neighborhood meeting if necessary, then implement the plan and monitor it to see if it's effective.

The goal was not to create a bureaucratic program, Vogan told the council. We wanted a phased approach that allows us to take steps and implement them quickly and effectively in the neighborhoods.

He said traffic calming by restriping Covered Wagon Drive near O'Hara Avenue has been effective in getting drivers to slow down.

Council members praised the new program.

Very good job. This is a wonderful document, said Councilwoman Pat Anderson. I was surprised to see that our road widths are on the high end. I didn't realize we had wider roads than most cities. I guess that accounts for some of the traffic issues we are seeing.

Mayor Bruce Connelley also praised the program, calling it an awesome job, but questioned whether it should be optional for city staff to hold a neighborhood meeting before putting in traffic calming measures in each neighborhood.

If it's something more than a stop sign, you should reach out to the neighborhood to let them know what you're doing, said Connelley. If there's 30 people (in the neighborhood) and 10 have a problem and the other 20 don't, we might spin our wheels and find out the rest of the neighborhood doesn't care.

Vogan argued in favor of keeping the meetings optional because often there are quick fixes that can be made that might not require a neighborhood meeting.

A lot of times traffic engineering is not a science; it's an art and evolves continually, he said. A lot of times we can go out there and make quick signage and striping fixes and bring it up to where it should be. It would be a waste of the neighborhood's time to say we will look to make it look the way it should be in the first place.

I'm a fan of neighborhood meetings. I just think that sometimes that initial meeting would be a waste. As we get beyond those minor, commonplace improvements, we do need to convene the meetings and move forward that way.

Anderson agreed, saying that a lot of people were cutting through her street and going very fast until restriping was done to make a turn look sharper than it had been, which has slowed down traffic. There may be a very simple way to solve it and we didn't need a meeting, she said.

If you have a traffic problem on your street, drop by City Hall and pick up a request form.