859 Vehicles A Day

The city has determined we need speed bumps on our street, and the residents voted and we all agreed to have them installed. The map shows one of the bumps will be right between my house and Susan's next door, with yellow warning signs erected at the sidewalk in front of our houses.

The red lines show where the speed bumps will be.

Our neighborhood is actually very, very quiet. Dogs bark in the distance at times, and voices are heard occasionally as people chat on the walking paths nearby. There is very little traffic on our street.

Except when there is a lot. It happens for 40 minutes in the morning as cars rush by to get their kids to school. The school is just up the hill from us, out of sight over the crest, but only a few houses away. It's a charter (magnet) school that draws from around the city, so few kids walk.

Then, for half an hour in the afternoon cars return and stack up down the road, each waiting to get into the school's front circle for pick up. I cannot get out of my driveway during those 30 minutes.

But that's it. During the rest of the day hardly a car goes by. Absolutely no traffic at all for long stretches.

I don't mind the school traffic. It's a noisy annoyance, but also the comfortable sound of people starting their day, of routines and schedules that mark the weekdays and mark the school calendar.

But it actually is a whole lot of traffic. A lot. The town did a traffic study last winter and reported that 859 vehicles use our street during a weekday, and the average speed is 30 mph.

Wow. I'm home most days and my front sliding door is just a few feet from the road and it just isn't that busy except for brief times. I hear the UPS truck and I hear the neighbors come and go and sometimes a dump truck rumbles by, lost on its way out of the construction site to the south of us. But there just isn't that much traffic most of the day, and none on weekends or in summer.

(The study explained that it counted a car on its way up the hill to drop off and then counted it again on the return down: two "trips" counted as two vehicles. And those two trips were counted again in the afternoon. It was one car, but it made four passes past the traffic counter on our street.)

But we're getting speed bumps. They won't reduce the busy morning and afternoon traffic or stop the cars from lining up in front of our driveway -- we'll still get over 800 vehicles a day -- but I guess they'll go slower.

And I'll have to lumber over the humps each time I leave the house and every time I return.

Ka-thunk.