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 —ÀúDrive 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.”
A new form of protest - civil obedience?
Go, Jane, go!