TIFTON — City council members are looking into a more extensive traffic calming program to combat speeding.

At the Oct. 8 city council meeting, city attorney Rob Wilmot announced he and other city staff had been looking into the traffic ordinances of other cities in the hopes of revising the city’s approach to slowing speeders.

Wilmot expressed that traffic calming devices like speed bumps and speed tables might not solve the problem, but instead move it somewhere else, as speeders would simply avoid the roads with these bumps and speed down other streets.

The revised ordinance would allow residents to apply for traffic calming programs within their neighborhood if they felt a speeding issue was present, at which point the public works department would conduct an on-site investigation, then make a recommendation on the best course of action to the city manager.

This could include solutions such as additional signage, neighborhood education programs, the narrowing of the street in question, or the installation of a traffic circle.

Wilmot proposed that speed bumps and similar traffic control be employed as more of a last resort in the event that a traffic calming instrument is instated and fails to solve the problem.

In the event a speed bump was necessary, the applicant would then need to obtain a 67% consensus for the speed bump to then have one installed.

The city attorney also noted that the ordinance would provide for a threshold for speed bumps to be installed upon a road.

These limits would require the street to be at least 800 feet long, support a volume of less than 1,600 vehicles, have a posted speed limit of 30 miles per hour or less, and that either 30% of drivers must be driving over the speed limit or 10% must be going over ten miles faster than it.

City council members agreed to discuss the item further at their upcoming meeting later this month.