Take It To the Limit —- Not Beyond

by Melinda Tuhus | January 6, 2006 11:36 AM | | Comments (6)

Jane Coppock (pictured) and her neighbors on the east side have launched a gutsy new campaign of civil obedience: They’re obeying this sign. Will their campaign catch fire in New Haven?

Coppock chairs the Quinnipiac East Management Team. The team’s members have started driving the speed limit. They hope their radical idea catches on all over town, creating safety and serenity wherever drivers take it to the limit.

Coppock demonstrated her M.O. Thursday by taking this reporter on a drive in her well-loved Honda Civic all over her district yesterday at mid-morning. We started out driving down Quinnipiac Avenue.

“There’s a big, fat truck behind us. He’s keeping his distance, he’s not breathing down my neck, and since I’m going 25, he has to go 25 — he has no choice. And he’s getting with the program. Most people just fall in line, and then you function to slow the whole street down.”

We crossed Route 80 heading north.

“Here we’re coming to a stretch that’s 35 mph, and so you can pick up the pace. The idea is to go with whatever the limit is. That’s why ‘Drive 25’ is not quite accurate, even though it rhymes. Our next step is to work with kids in the schools to come up with slogans, and to also reach their parents.”


No-Speed Freaks

Coppock’s management team came up with the idea for this campaign when a survey showed that speeding was one of residents’ three main concerns in this large district east of the Quinnipiac River. Members realized that catching speeders was low on the police department’s list of priorities, and that changing the physical structure of city streets, through speed bumps or some other measure, is costly and not always an elegant solution.

“So we said, Hey, there are actually speed limits in this town! It’s free, and it’s something we can do. Let’s try something radical, like go the speed limit, and see what happens.”

Most city streets — even some major thoroughfares like Quinnipiac Avenue and East Grand Avenue — are posted at 25 miles per hour; others, mostly state roads through New Haven, are posted at 30 or 35 miles per hour. Coppock has been hewing strictly to those limits for the past three or four months. “At first, it seems incredibly slow,” she said. “Your speed drops to the point where you don’t feel in a hurry; you have time to react if something comes out in front of you, like a child running or on a bike. You can see what’s around you, and it turns out to be very relaxing. And it doesn’t take that much longer to get anywhere. Suddenly, going from place to place in the city is a pleasant thing.”

She says some people worried that if they drove that slowly, people behind them would get mad, and perhaps speed around them.

“Occasionally that happens,” she says, “but 99 percent of the time, if you go 25 miles per hour, you function as a pace car on the street, and most people just resign themselves to it, and they fall in behind you, and then the whole street goes 25. Every once in a while, some hot dogger will get impatient and go around you — just let them go around you. But in all these months, I’ve never had anything happen that I would call dangerous.”

Coppock moved to New Haven in 1989 to attend Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where she now works as an assistant dean. She bought a two-family house in Fair Haven Heights in 2002 and was elected chair of the management team in 2004. She loves New Haven; last year she drove down every street in the city, on the theory that to know New Haven better was to love it even more. She especially loves the east side, where she said the answer to a management team survey about what residents liked best was, “My neighbors.”







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Comments

Posted by: Paul Wessel | January 6, 2006 3:34 PM

A new form of protest - civil obedience?

Go, Jane, go!

Posted by: Peter Dobkin Hall | January 7, 2006 4:54 AM

To make this a genuinely livable city, New Haven needs to take more seriously not only the problem of speeding, but also the enforcement of crosswalk ordinances.

Many streets in this city, including most particularly Whitney Avenue -- where motorists routinely travel at 40-60 mph -- are deathtraps. The city occaisionally places speed traps at the intersection of Whitney and East Rock, but this is hardly adaquate give the scope of the problem.

While a few downtown crosswalks have signs callng motoerists' attention to the fact that the law requires them to yield to pedestrians, these signs should be everywhere and the law should be strictly enforced. (I work in Cambridge, where motorisy do yield to pedestrians. It makes it a much more pleasant place!).

Finally, the city needs to identify its most hazardous streets and intersections.

One particularly dangerous place is the intersection of Whitney and Audubon. This crossing is used by students from ECA and the Neighborhood Music School. The intersection has no cross walk.
Because cars coming from downtown accelerate coming up the long block from Grove Street, it is particularly hazardous.

Another is the intersection of Lawrence and Whitney. It too has no cross walk. Speeding cars coming up and down Whitney make no effort to slow or stop for pedestrians.

If our Department of Traffic & Parking made pedestrian safety a higher priority than parking enforcement, New Haven would be a safer city!!

Posted by: Ned Pocengal | January 7, 2006 10:28 AM

Go (slowly) Jane! It seems that the DOT (department of traffic) must hate pedestrians, bicyclists and tranquility. I live on the Willow St. Expressway/Dragstrip where the posted speed limit is treated as a factor of the normal speed, which is apparently 50mph. Ms. Coggio could bring her class here to demonstrate the Doppler Effect as cars speed past with their stereos blasting...
On a trip to Mexico, I noted admiringly the huge speed bumps (topes, in Spanish), on busy roads, in the centers of towns and villages, which have the intended effect of slowing traffic way down. New Haven, could achieve the same traffic calming effect by allowing the city streets to deteriorate further or constructing raised pedestrian crosswalks - maybe on a trial basis? Many cities, in the U.S. and around the world are experimenting with traffic calming strategies and techniques - why not New Haven?

Posted by: nfjanette [TypeKey Profile Page] | January 7, 2006 10:32 PM

Every once in a while, some hot dogger will get impatient and go around you – just let them go around you. But in all these months, I’ve never had anything happen that I would call dangerous.�

Ms. Coppock has been very fortunate; my own experience has involved a great deal of beeping horns and furious gestures by drivers behind me, and I drive at the "limit" plus 5 MPH. It's a common occurance to be passed - sometimes on the right side parking lane - by insane local drivers.

Posted by: B | January 10, 2006 9:03 AM

Insane "local drivers"?
That's nice.
If we want to start pointing fingers, let's look at the Ivy league cwho couldn't find a crosswalk if you raised it up six feet and hit them in the face with it.
If they actually land in the cross walk, as it happens to fall neath the crow's path to their destination, you better believe those crazy white stripes are way to distracting to pay attention to the blinky decorations hanging from the telephone poles.
Maybe we could use these cute little Blue speed bumps over at the hospital, get the Cancer center under way and not have to worry about paying for traffic control.

Posted by: kathy h. | April 3, 2006 4:16 PM

I have lived in the neighborhood for seven years, and I have no patience for people like Ms. Coppock who would like to make a major artery into a neighborhood lane. Quinnipiac Avenue is a state highway, at least north of Foxon, and it is used mostly by locals to get through the city. If you live on a major street like Quinnipiac, you have to live with the fact that it's not a minor, neighborhood street only.

The accidents that have occured are from people speeding at incredible rates, not from people moving along at 30 or even 40 miles an hour. By "driving the limit" at 25, Ms. Coppock and friends, are enforcing the letter of the law, but they are also imposing their dream of a sleepy neighborhood on everyone else. This is the dark side of NIMBYISM -- self-righteous and passive-aggressive. The politicians and many neighbors pay lip service to Ms. Coppock et al., but I hope they won't cave to these meddlesome traffic "cops".

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