Councilman Steve DeBrum wants Cottage Avenue made safer between the Highway 99 overpass and Louise Avenue and he doesn’t want to spend thousands on a consultant to do so.

DeBrum got his council colleagues to agree. As a result, staff is expected to have some solutions to present at the May 7 Manteca City Council meeting. They could range from placing crosswalks at Brookdale Way  all the way to a roundabout at Button Avenue.

“I want something put in place that will best address the problem,” DeBrum said.

He is as much concerned about the safety of children crossing Cottage Avenue where traffic often exceeds the posted speed limit of 35 mph as he is about making the stretch less intimidating and frustrating from motorists driving Button Avenue.

Four things the city is dealing with that would be considered design flaws by today’s standards:

• Brookdale is with 175 feet of Button Avenue.

• Button intersects Cottage at the base of the Highway 99 overpass.

• The overpass itself has a higher pitch than modern bridges.

• Button Avenue traffic patterns makes it a collector street which makes the angle it intersects with Cottage all that more precarious at times.

Complicating matters is the strong possibility that a just completed citywide speed survey may force Manteca to raise the speed limit on Cottage Avenue. State law dictates speed surveys in order to have speeding tickets stand up in court. Under state law speed limits must be set within 5 mph of the 85 percentile of recorded speeds of vehicle traffic that is surveyed.