Along Good Drive over the course of the past week, there’s been one of those digital roadside speed indicators - tells you your speed as you pass it. I got sort of a chuckle out of it because I drive Good Drive probably on average once a day, and speeding is almost never an issue there. The issue, rather, is that people drive too slowly.
Actually, I might have just described Lancaster County on the whole. I’ve long believed that this county’s traffic problems - and here I’m only being half facetious - are caused by the fact you’ve got three kinds of motorists here: Those who just moved here from someplace like Philadelphia or Connecticut and drive like they’re 15 minutes late for the most important meeting of their lives at all time; elderly drivers, who tend to go 10 mph below the speed limit regardless of road; and the locals, who frankly aren’t all that far removed from the horse and buggy and who also tend to drive, let’s say, very cautiously.
The result tends to be that on most of the roads in the urban/suburbanized parts of the county, you simply can’t go the posted speed limit. Columbia Avenue itself would be another case in point - along the road near where I live, the posted limit is 40 mph. I can honestly say that aside from late at night, I have never driven 40 mph on that road.
On Good Drive, the speed limit is 35 mph; again, it’s rare to actually go that fast on the road, as many of the drivers seem content to mosey along at 30 mph, even 25. There is a retirement community along the road, so many of the drivers are by nature older. And traffic tends to back up, which will slow you down anywhere. But there also seems to be a distinct lack of urgency among drivers on Good Drive - drivers throughout the county. As if, you know, they’re not in any big hurry. And that drives the rest of us - who were supposed to be at a meeting five minutes ago, who have to get the kid to baseball or ballet practice, or who are simply had a long day at work and would merely like to get home as rapidly as possible - nuts.
And that tension creates as much of a traffic hazard as speeders themselves.
So I’m not sure what East Hempfield, which owns Good Drive, thought it was doing with the speed meter out there last week. But for the portion of the road just past the railroad tracks - where cars, inexplicably, tend to jump the curb and crash through the white picket fence - speeding really isn’t an issue on Good Drive, particularly where the speed meter was located (about halfway between Columbia Avenue and Marietta Pike).
Then again, East Hempfield has enough of its own problems. So maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. Just like half the drivers on Good Drive itself, I’d say.
