Residents call for Council to take action on speeding on Lankford

The community matters section of a City Council meeting provides the opportunity for people to directly address elected officials. Two people stood before Council on May 5 to point out there is a speeding problem on one city street.

“Lankford Avenue is a residential neighborhood where the speed limit is 25 miles per hour,” said Kettie Rupnik of Lankford Avenue. “Of the 12 homes that are on the upper part of Lankford, there are 18 children that live with these 12 homes from ages six months to 11 years in addition to seniors within our neighborhood.”

The City of Charlottesville has conducted speed studies which officially determined there was no problem. Rupnik and others continue to disagree. She said she and others have not yet seen the results of a new version.

“I’m concerned those speed studies are not representative of the actual speeding problem that occurs on our streets,” Rupnik said.

Rupnik called for traffic calming measures to be installed and asked Councilors to watch video evidence she provided of a car speeding past at 50 miles an hour while she and her husband were feet away.

Deputy City Manager James Freas addressed the issue and said city staff have been working on an “urgent infrastructure list” to make improvements in the near term.

“One of the projects on that list is in Lankford Avenue to install a speed cushion or speed table,” Freas said. “See how it works. Drive fire trucks over it. Make sure that we’re comfortable with the tool but the idea is that once we’ve done that we would move forward in installing a permanent solution.”

Council was briefed on these initiatives at their meeting on January 21, 2025. For more information, go back and read the story I wrote. Since then there have been several installations such as on the slip lanes in the northern quadrants of the intersection of Preston Avenue and McIntire Road. Yield signs were replaced with stop signs.

There’s not yet any place on the city’s website to get progress updates on the work.

“We are still working on refining the final list of projects associated with this effort, but the Department of Public Works saw an opportunity to address some items from the list while it was in draft form, using materials that were already available on hand,” reads an April 29 email from transportation planning manager Ben Chambers.

I’ve tried looking for this information in the following locations.

• The Department of Public Works has a Capital Development Division. Their project page is “under maintenance.”
• There is a “Transportation and Mobility” section under the Public Works website. This has a list of major transportation project but not the smaller projects that Public Works has been installing.

Chambers said that the final list will go before Council in the near future with a request to use surplus money to make more changes.

“We are also going to have an ongoing online survey for each project location, with temporary signage placed at each project location that provides a link and QR code to the survey,” Chambers said. “This is going to help us inform the community about the changes that are occurring, and also allow us to collect feedback on what is working and what isn’t.”

Meanwhile, other changes have been made such as a narrowing of the intersection of Forest Hills Avenue and Forest Ridge Road using plastic tubes.

Vice Mayor Brian Pinkston asked if the Lankford speed table could be moved up, but Freas said he could give no definitive answer other than by the end of year.

“It will depend on our ability to get the materials delivered,” Freas said.

City Manager Sam Sanders said Council will be asked to appropriate funding at the next meeting on May 19.

Top photo: Bulb-out installed at intersection of Forest Hills Avenue and Forest Ridge Road. Note that the actual installation deviates from where the lines were drawn.

Before you go: This story originally went out in the May 6, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. Take a look here! For more information, please visit this page which is in the process of being updated!