What speed limit should be posted on this road section or in that district? On the one hand, elected municipal representatives are often asked by residents to lower speed limits for safety reasons and on the other hand, some motorists are requesting higher speed limits. Speed is a controversial subject. The Manual for setting speed limits on municipal road networks is born of the need for a tool to facilitate such decision-making. For its part, the ministère des Transports du Québec has also wanted to manage more systematically speeds on the highway network it maintains by publishing the Modèle de détermination de limite de vitesse in February 1994. This Manual relates to one-, two-, or four-lane roads. In Québec, three-lane roads or roads with more than four lanes are considered special cases and are quite rare. They deserve complete and rigorous analysis beyond the scope of this Manual. In 1993, the Québec Government transferred to municipalities the management and maintenance of local road networks that were up to then the responsibility of the ministère des Transports. The transfer revived the debate about setting speed limits on municipal networks and highlighted the need for a uniform procedure for changing speed limits on the municipal networks in municipalities as well as in the ministère des Transports. On December 5, 1994, at a meeting of the Comité permanent de liaison transport-municipalités (ministère des Transports du Québec (MTQ), the Union des municipalités du Québec (UMQ), the Union des municipalités régionales de comté et des municipalités locales du Québec (UMRCQ), now the Fédération québécoise des municipalités (FQM), and the ministère des Affaires municipales (MAM), now the ministère des Affaires municipales et de la Métropole (MAMM), the participants agreed on the necessity of publishing a manual for setting speed limits on municipal road networks. The ministère des Transports du Québec established a task force on the procedure for setting speed limits on municipal road networks, consisting of members of the Union des municipalités du Québec, of the Association des directeurs de police et pompiers du Québec, now the Association des directeurs de police du Québec, of the Association des ingénieurs municipaux du Québec, of a representative of the ministère des Affaires municipales, of experts from the ministère des Transports and of the Director of the firm Safestreet. A preliminary version of the manual, applicable to public roads with no more than two traffic lanes was drafted in October 1995. The proposed procedure was the subject of consultations with the regional directorates of the ministère des Transports throughout 1996. Comments were collected and analysed and a second task force wrote the final version of the Manual. To date, there have been two editions of this Manual for roads with no more than two traffic lanes, one published in January 1998 and one in April 1999. The ministère des Transports established a third task force in 1998 to develop a procedure for setting speed limits on four-lane roads. The results of their work have been integrated into this Manual. The adoption by municipalities and by the ministère des Transports of a uniform method for setting speed limits on municipal road networks will help simplify and speed up the processing of requests for changes. The Manual is focused on five areas and is divided in as many chapters: - the legal framework of speed limits and exceptions; - the objective and principles of setting speed limits; - the role and importance of speed limits; - the method of setting speed limits on municipal networks; - measures to reduce excessive speed. (Author/publisher)
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