General News
21 June, 2022
Community input on traffic issues
TRAFFIC precincts have been established across Mareeba to ensure a more targeted approach to traffic issues and enable specific community input for each identified area.
The eight Local Area Traffic Management (LATM) areas will allow Mareeba Shire Council to deal with issues in the defined precincts in a holistic way to ensure that fixing a problem in one street or suburb does not adversely affect other areas surrounding it.
“There is an ever-increasing demand from local communities for council to address unwanted traffic intrusion into residential streets,” a report to council stated.
“Many councils in the past have addressed traffic management issues within a particular street or at a specific location with little consideration to the implications of such measures on surrounding streets, or the wider road network.
“This approach, while addressing the concerns of the residents in the immediate area may move the problem to surrounding streets. The resulting traffic issues can become more difficult and expensive to address than the original problem.”
A strong focus of the LATM model is ensuring that the community is involved in identifying the problems and solutions.
To achieve this, traffic study groups for each precinct will be formed which will be made up of council officers and community representatives whose role will be to provide local information, act as a contact for the local community and to provide feedback in the development of traffic management plans for the area.
To determine what issues are in each precinct, a survey questionnaire will be distributed to all households in the precinct which will then be reviewed by council officers and developed into a plan that would then be presented to a community forum for feedback.
Councillors were told that due to the work and resources required, only one precinct per year will be done, and priority would be based on criteria such as accident rates, commercial vehicle numbers, percentage of through traffic, requests received by council, traffic volumes and vehicle speeds.
The first precinct to be tackled will be the area around Anzac Avenue.
The LATM precincts can be viewed on council’s website.
