From the Pilotonline.com article including being able to comment and a Poll entitled Should Virginia Beach lower the speed limit to 35 mph along the stretch of Shore Drive where a teacher was hit and killed?

Ten pedestrians have died in the past eight years on the 11-mile road that stretches along the Bay before ending at the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s actually at most a 6 mile section where 10 pedestrians have died.

A safety task force created in 2005 after five pedestrians were killed on Shore Drive will probably be reconstituted.

The Shore Drive Safety Task Force was never dissolved. It’s recommendations where adopted by City Council in 2006, and have not yet been completed.

[L]owering the speed limit would not have a significant impact, because the stopping distance for cars would not change much. (The per-second stopping difference between 45 and 35 mph is about 15 feet.)

According to the Virginia Driver’s Manual, cars on dry level pavement stopping distances are from 35mph – 135 ft, from 45mph – 195 ft and from 55mph – 265 ft.

Update: From Commonwealth of Virginia Legislation:

46.2-880. Tables of speed and stopping distances.

All courts shall take notice of the following tables of speed and stopping distances of motor vehicles, which shall not raise a presumption, in actions in which inquiry thereon is pertinent to the issues: Click to view table.

Back to select quotes from Va Pilot article & feedback:

The challenge from a traffic engineering perspective is to move motorists through the area while making it’s safe for cars and people within the corridor.

“It’s a huge conflict,” Gey said.

In case you haven’t read the entire Shore Drive Safety Task Force Recommendations, located at VBGov.com here, this is a small excerpt:

Central to this evaluation will be the understanding that Shore Drive serves as the sole east-west transportation corridor in the City north of the I-264 / Virginia Beach Boulevard corridor. As such, from a land use perspective, it needs to be considered as a multimodal corridor and not solely as a vehicular corridor. Increased densities of development in the corridor demand that pedestrian amenities are more fully addressed in all aspects of the development process, from the rezoning and conditional use permit stage through to the development plan approval and inspection stage. The goal of improving the level of transportation services for a wide variety of users – pedestrians of all types, cyclists, in-line skaters, varied recreational users, transit users, as well as vehicle operators – and the interrelationships between these various users and land uses in an area characterized as being first and foremost as a resort community and not as a resort destination is suggested. Accordingly, both public and private proposed development criteria need to be evaluated from a multimodal perspective to ensure that the needs of these varied users are addressed. Since increasing roadway capacity in the area has strict limits, given the City Council directive that Shore Drive remain a four lane facility for the foreseeable future, greater emphasis needs to be placed on reducing intra-corridor trip demand, particularly where non- vehicular transit among various uses in the corridor can be promoted and encouraged.

Emphasis mine.

Vice Mayor Louis Jones and Councilman Jim Wood, who represent different sections of Shore Drive, said they would support lowering the speed limit if that’s what residents wanted.