Town of Whiteville Considers Reducing Speed Limit to 20 MPH on City Streets
During the Monday, July 7, 2025, City of Whiteville Board of Alderman meeting, Whiteville Police Chief Ben Davis requested the alderman to vote on reducing the speed limit to 20 miles per hour on the city streets of Whiteville. Speeding on neighborhood streets and down Main Street have been an ongoing concern for the safety of the community and a challenge for enforcing the law by the Whiteville Police Department (WPD).
The proposal was made to address the inconsistencies in the city where speed limits are 20 miles per hour on some streets, 30 miles per hour on other streets, and speed limits unknown to the public due to faded or missing speed limit signs.
“If there are no signs, then we really can’t enforce it because if we don’t know what the speed limit is, we can’t write anybody up,” said Chief Davis, who noted the safety concern to pedestrians. “We have a lot of streets here that don’t have sidewalks. I believe the safest way to make it straight across the board is to reduce all the streets down to 20 miles per hour that the city has jurisdiction on.”
A community suggestion was to add speed bumps, but that plan would not be practical and would be a costly resolution if all City street/roads were to have speed bumps. Chief Davis also expressed his concern about installing speed bumps.
“I don’t want to put speed bumps on every major street here in town, because it slows down a lot of our emergency personnel, fire trucks and ambulances.”
Martin Luther Jr. Drive is one road where a Sky Cop camera was placed to monitor the excessive speeds of some drivers. Chief Davis also commented about the Core Civic traffic, which resulted in adding speed bumps on Woodland Avenue.
“Woodland Avenue and Bass Street are where we have a lot of our Core Civic traffic that comes through because they hit Woodland to hit Independence to Union Springs just like they hit Bass to go to the light. That is one reason we had to put speed bumps on Woodland,” said Chief Davis.
Chief Davis also addressed the reputation the City of Whiteville has as a speed trap.
“Ninety percent of our tickets that are for speeding are 12 and 15 over [the posted speed limit], but that is on the Highway. On these secondary streets, it’s going to be lower than that, because we just can’t give that much of a difference because the faster you go over that speed limit, the longer it takes for you to come to a complete stop,” said Chief Davis.
In a unanimous vote, the Board of Alderman approved the first reading allowing the speed limit to be reduced to 20 miles per hour on all the city streets in the Town of Whiteville jurisdiction. A second reading will be done at the Monday, August 4, 2025, Whiteville Board of Alderman meeting, which will be held at 6:30 p.m.
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