After months of complaints from Issaquah Highlands residents, the city of Issaquah is taking definitive steps to tackle speeding in one of the most notorious neighborhoods in town for unsafe driving.

Last week, Highlands residents noticed the latest measure taken to reduce speeding — sets of tube counters gracing the roadway on 24th Avenue Northeast and 25th Avenue Northeast, two of the streets that have especially garnered attention for having fast drivers.

The addition of the tube counters came just two weeks after the conclusion of a month-long campaign by the Issaquah Police Department to increase speed patrols in the Highlands. During this campaign, about 180 people were pulled over for speeding, with 120 of them receiving tickets, according to Sergeant Laura Asbell of the Issaquah Police Department.

The two identical black tube counters lie parallel to one another across the roadway, tracking information as cars drive over them. The tube counters collect a variety of data, such as the speed at which a car is going, the size of the car and the time of day it passes over the tubes.

“In order for us to know the extent of the problem, we collect data … After we collect this most recent data, we intend to have a neighborhood meeting,” said Emily Moon, deputy city administrator for the city of Issaquah.

Moon has worked in cities across the United States, and one thing all of those communities have in common, she said, is a speeding problem.

“It’s a perplexing concern because it has to do with human behavior,” she said. “First and foremost, it is something the driver can control.”

The city’s Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program, established in 2003, breaks down speed controls into phases. The first phase, which the Highlands is currently in, focuses on having conversations with the community about the problem and gathering data that can be studied; the second phase includes engineering solutions, such as speed humps, for streets “that fail to be solved by Phase 1 solutions,” according to the city.

Last autumn, as part of Phase 1, the city held a community gathering at Blakely Hall to discuss the speeding issue.

City Council President Stacy Goodman, who lives in the Highlands, said that she wasn’t sure how well the conversation phase of the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program would work in a neighborhood like the Highlands, where “people are set in their ways” and “not going to change their behavior unless they’re forced to change.”

“I’m concerned about whether under some circumstances many of the steps are effective,” she said. “As soon as those temporary efforts [to reduce speeding] stop, people return to their behaviors.”

The speeding in the Highlands, she explained, is not due to pass-through traffic; the primary offenders are the residents of the same streets that are being affected.

The data supports this. Asbell said that during the month of extra enforcement, “a lot of the [drivers who were stopped] were local residents who live up there.”

When speeding is so ingrained in the local behavior, Goodman said, people will go back to their unsafe driving habits just as soon as the extra patrol cars stop being an everyday sight.

“I appreciate the efforts the police department is taking … I just think we need more permanent solutions,” Goodman said. “We’re starting [the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program] at the beginning of all the steps, and I think we’re at the point for looking at permanent solutions.”

In the months since the initial community meeting, a group of Highlands residents has become very vocal in demanding that the city come up with a solution for the speeding problem.

Moon said that the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program “welcomes the involvement of a neighborhood sponsor.”

“The city can’t easily determine which treatment … is most effective without that input,” she said.

Highlands resident Paul Omekanda, who has been spearheading the effort to combat speedy driving, said that Goodman and Deputy Council President Mary Lou Pauly had made themselves very available to talk to their constituents about the speeding concerns, showing that they were “willing enough and passionate enough to come into the neighborhood and find out what the issues are.”

“I’m very grateful for the help of two particular council members, Mary Lou Pauly and Stacy Goodman,” Omekanda said. “These two council members went out of their way to make sure my voice was heard. Without them, I would’ve gotten the run-around.”

Goodman said that she is happy to meet with anyone worried about the unsafe driving, and encouraged residents to contact her.

“If we’re all concerned about our families, our kids, our pets, we need to have permanent solutions,” Goodman said.