Speed Demons & Speed Bumps
If you do not have attending an HOA meeting on your bucket list, I highly recommend you add it immediately. “Why in the world would I want to do that?” you might ask. Well, let us just say it’s one of those things that everyone should have the joy of experiencing, right after they finish climbing Mt. Everest, driving the pace car at the Daytona 500 or whatever other more mundane things they may have on their list.
The subdivision where I live was built mostly back in the 1970’s and has a voluntary HOA, which basically means there are no membership fees, no rules or regulations and no enforcement capabilities whatsoever. They have quarterly meetings at a local church and the donations contributed by the exceedingly small number of members primarily goes towards taking care of the landscaping at our entrance and the permits for our annual community garage sale.
My neighborhood is normally a very calm, quiet place with many of the owners having lived there for many years or even decades. The majority of the properties are all reasonably well kept, maintained and relatively conservative in their overall appearance. The one major challenge we have is that our neighborhood serves as a “cut through” for many drivers looking for a shortcut or a way to circumvent the light at a nearby major intersection. While this is not ideal, it is certainly not illegal even if it is very annoying for the residents.
The real problem is that the main road through our subdivision goes for several blocks and has only one stop sign, which of course is mostly ignored by the drivers who are cutting through. Not only do they treat the stop sign as a suggestion rather than the rule of law, they also feel that the posted speed limit of 25 mph does not apply to them, so having dozens and dozens of drivers blast up and down the main road at over 50 mph has become such a common occurrence that it’s now the new normal.
Sure, efforts have been made to slow down these callous, reckless, and downright dangerous drivers with little or no affect. Some residents have these cute little “Children at Play” signs they put out near the street indicating they have children. Most of these signs have been run over. The county sometimes temporarily installs those big electronic signs that register and display each car’s speed as it approaches. These are great for slowing down the residents who are sometime a little heavy footed, but they are taken as a high score opportunity by most of the cutters. Once in a blue moon, a county sheriff comes out and shoots radar, but the place he sets up is very visible and while he does issue a couple of citations during the short time he’s there, it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem the other 362 days per year.
Our association’s most recent meeting included the topic of installing speed bumps on our subdivision’s main road and I figured that since I hadn’t been to one of our HOA meetings in a while that this would be a good one to attend. Going into it, I didn’t think that discussing the need for installing speed bumps would be all that big a deal. As a matter of fact, it seemed pretty much like a no brainer since nothing else was working even a little, and short of the residents setting up road blocks with armed militia, what other options are there that would actually slow the speed demons down?
The first few residents who spoke shared a litany of negative experiences they had had with speeding drivers. Some had been cursed at, spit at and given the one finger salute for simply waving their arms up and down (the universal signal for please slow down). Others recounted how they were terrified to go on walks with their children or grandchildren in their own neighborhood because there were so many speeding drivers. Some even told of drivers who had lost control of their cars and spun out into their front yards or destroyed their mailboxes.
Next were the residents who were adamantly opposed to speed bumps in any form or fashion. Their justifications spanned the gamut from decreased property values, damage to their cars, the fact that speed bumps are ugly and the torturous sounds they would be forced to endure as cars scrapped over the bumps.
Then came our neighborhood expert on all things speed bumps related, a retired fire department captain who still owns and lives in the house he originally purchased in our neighborhood back in 1974. And when he got up to speak, he brought props. Lots of props that included studies and reports full of statistics , all of which he was willing to share with us in vivid detail.
Fortunately for you I’m not in as much of a mood to share as our beloved fire captain, so I’ll jump ahead and provide you with the common conclusion of all his information: speed bumps increase the response time of emergency vehicles approximately of 30 seconds.
Now 30 seconds may not seem like an incredibly long time, but I suppose that comes down to the context in which you are making your evaluation. If you are doing something that you enjoy, time seems to fly by and 30 seconds is little different than a snap of your fingers. But if something terrible has happened and you are in dire need of the police, fire department, an ambulance or some other type of emergency responders, 30 seconds can feel like 30 hours and can literally be the difference between life and death.
Not surprisingly, it turned out that the residents are firmly entrenched into two separate camps: those for bumps and those against. So, what was the determining factor that determined which camp a particular resident chose? The answer turned out to be quite simple: If you live on a street that the speed demons use to cut through the neighborhood, you are all for speed bumps. If you don’t live on one of these specific streets, you’re against speed bumps.
What this does is confirm that people make decisions based on how things affect them on an intimate, personal level and rarely put the greater good above their own, even when it only involves a small inconvenience on their part. The information showing how speed bumps slow down emergency response vehicles, while valid, held little or no sway on the residents directly impacted by the cars speeding past their house each day. And in return, the fear many residents have regarding the safety of themselves, their children and grandchildren fell on the deaf ears of their neighbors.
As of the writing of this blog post, it remains to be determined if we are going to have speed bumps installed in our neighborhood or not. A study has been commissioned by the county to determine if the amount of traffic through our neighborhood meets their minimum requirements allowing them to be installed and at what frequency.
I never expected that what I thought would be a forgone conclusion would end up being such an “Us versus Them” decision, and regardless of which camp ultimately wins, it’s been fascinating to experience first hand how people process, express, justify and support their position on any given subject, even speed bumps.