BRENHAM CITY COUNCIL MAY NEED TO CHANGE 290 SPEED LIMIT AGAIN
The Brenham City Council will reconsider the speed limits for Highway 290 through the city limits when they meet Thursday.
The City Council set the speed limits from the eastern city limit out to the cloverleaf at 60 miles per hour at their last meeting.
City Manager Terry Roberts says the Council may have to reconsider that decision because of objections from the Texas Department of Transportation. Roberts said TxDot had done a traffic survey and determined that the speed limit be raised from 65 to 70 miles per hour from FM 577/Blue Bell Road to the BNSF Railroad tracks and from 60 to 65 from the railroad tracks to Business 290.
Roberts says TxDot has told the city that unless the city does their own traffic survey, they should follow their recommendations.
The Brenham City Council will likely revise the speed limits when they take up the matter on the second reading.
Brenham Police Chief Rex Phelps had expressed concerns about the higher speed limits, noting the number of traffic accidents on the city stretch of the highway in the past two years.
This area, especially the newly constructed part between FM 577 and the RR tracks, is nothing but a speed trap for BPD to spend its days and nights writing speeding tickets. The speed limit through there is too low and this isn’t by accident. They want to keep traffic ticket revenue up, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with accident reports. How could it, this is newly built highway? Any accident data from the past would be too inaccurate to consider valid. Our tax dollars pay for BPD officers to sit on the downhill East side of the new highway and catch speeders. Meanwhile city parks and other areas are unusable to the “majority” of citizens, because they are essentially unsafe for “us”. It wold be nice to be able to take our children to ANY park/recreation area in Brenham, not just a select few. But instead I have to worry about getting a speeding ticket in Brenham’s new speed trap. Way to go BPD and city council!
The only concern for the City Council of Brenham should be the safety and well being of the citizens of Brehham. If TXDOT doesn’t like it — too bad. Our police chief’s opinion should weigh in as being much more important that outsiders who don’t have a vested interest in our town!
Since the Brenham City Council doesn’t have its own “traffic survey”, perhaps the Council could provide TxDot with copies of the numerous traffic accident reports instead. The Council is right in putting the safety of our citizens ahead of cutting the drive time from Houston to Austin by a few minutes!
Well city gov. granted a nice stoplight at 36n 577 hows it working, o buy the way also 290 and 290 west pass the clover leaf.humm thankyou city planners.Storm travel route,,redlight.or anybig holiday.lets hurry up..then wait, humm nice planners
I know that’s right. We should be thinking about fixing that stupid cloverleaf. We should be making an effort to make a new overpass that will send us to Austin instead of the crap we have now. Maybe move the overpass from by Holt park and put it over there where the cloverleaf is. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!