Steering Toward Slower Traffic

By Colleen Gundlach

I recently rode in the car with a friend who never exceeded the speed limit during the whole trip. She drove very carefully, calmly and in complete control. I wondered if I could do the same, with the same sense of calm and control. I am not a fast driver, but, like most of us, I have been known to occasionally push the limits, so I decided to try an experiment. For the past month or so, I have been highly cognizant of the speed limit on each highway and local road I have traveled, and have, for the most part, kept spot on each posted limit. The result was a lot of angry, impatient people. 

I found that it’s an unspoken rule that no one drives at the speed limit. I found relatively few people who have been willing to stay at least a car’s length behind me while I traveled at 25 miles per hour (mph) down Route 44 in Norfolk or many other areas with low posted speed limits. According to my research, the general rule of thumb of defensive driving is that a driver should leave one car length between his car and the one in front of him for every 10 miles per hour they are traveling. How often have you seen someone staying at least two car lengths behind you while you are driving down Route 44 at 25 mph past the library and Infinity? Not often.

Early one morning I was traveling to Canaan, doing 45 mph toward the town line. As I passed the Ashpohtag intersection I noticed a tailgater. He was so close that I couldn’t see his headlights in my mirror. He was obviously in a hurry, but I maintained my 45 mph speed, as posted. The impatience was just too much for this person and he blew by me in a no passing zone, on a corner, at a pretty good clip. My speed limit experiment was validated, however, when a state trooper lying in wait near Blackberry River Inn apparently witnessed the encounter and delayed the tailgater’s trip a bit longer that morning.

Route 263 between Winsted and Winchester Center is a road I often travel at about the same time each day. That road is mostly posted at 35 mph. There is one SUV that travels the same route as I do, close on the back end of my car, and by the third day I noticed him I could almost hear him saying, “oh no, not her again” as he again sped up behind me.

I wonder why this need to speed is so prevalent. Could it be that we are all just so rushed to get from place to place that we don’t care how fast we are going and believe we are justified in speeding because we need to be somewhere? Or have we just been driving so long that we no longer even look at the posted speed limits? As Norfolk Economic Development Commission (EDC) member Bill Brown mentioned in his letter to the editor in the December/January issue of Norfolk Now, the EDC is working diligently to slow traffic down throughout the town. Their initiatives have resulted in favorable responses from the state Department of Transportation, which may in turn result in new signage and reduced speed limits – on Route 44 particularly. 

However, the signage and speed limits are only as effective as the drivers allow them to be. If no one obeys them, we will have no decrease in the speeding through town and elsewhere. If every Norfolk resident were to drive the speed limit through town, we should be able to slow down those behind us who have no intention of obeying the 25 mph on 44. And who knows, maybe as a result that trooper out by Blackberry River Inn won’t have anyone else to pull over first thing in the morning – or anytime.