Community Corner

Killingworth Traffic Group Wants Speeding Crackdown

The Traffic Safety Committee wants to expand its job of getting drivers to slow down.

Armed with several years’ worth of data from local roads Killingworth’s Traffic Safety Committee wants to broaden the scope of its study efforts and may seek increased funding from the town to enforce local speed limits.

“We’ve got a lot of data collected, we know what the problems are and we’ve arrived at the solution,” said Robert Ellis, chairman of the traffic committee. “The most effective means to control speeding is enforcement, but enforcement costs money.”

Since it was created about four years ago the committee, with the use of two small contraptions called SpeedSpys, has figured out what most people already know anecdotally: People drive too fast on local roads. In fact, the data collected by the speed data collectors, small tan boxes that are affixed to telephone poles, have helped the committee identify some of the roads that have the most speeding problems in town.

Find out what's happening in Durham-Middlefieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

More importantly, Ellis said, the boxes also have collected data on what days and at what times speeding occurs most often, and just how much over the speed limit folks are driving. That specific information, he added, will allow his committee to target enforcement efforts around town.

The problem, however, is getting the money to do that work.

Find out what's happening in Durham-Middlefieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The committee was created in 2007 out of the concerns of some local residents about traffic and speeding in town. After, it did something rather novel for a small town. It got a $17,000 federal traffic enforcement grant with the help of a Boston-area grant writer the town hired. The committee used $9,000 of the grant to buy a couple radar machines, box trailers used frequently in small towns that show drivers their speed compared to the posted speed limit.

The committee also spent part of that money to buy the two SpeedSpys. The remaining $8,000 went toward enforcement. That enforcement, Ellis said, entails hiring extra state police patrols along roads that are known to have major speeding problems, as identified by the Spy Boxes. Those patrols are costly and this past year the town budgeted $6,000 for the extra police patrols.

That money doesn’t go far, Ellis said. It pays for only about 60-70 hours worth of enforcement for the entire year.

“So here we are being very frustrated,” he said.

His committee is considering using the data from the Spy Boxes to ask the Board of Selectmen for more money to increase police patrols, beyond what the town’s resident trooper can handle.

Some of the roads where the speed boxes have identified speeding issues include Roast Meat Hill, Stevens and Green Hill roads. On Roast Meat Hill Road, where the speed limit is 25 mph, the data indicates that the average speed of drivers is closer to 38 mph. That data, and complaints about the intersection of Roast Meat Hill and Stevens roads, led the Board of Selectmen recently to install a stop sign at the intersection. Ellis said the sign has helped slow some speeders.

But since the speed limit on 97 percent of all roads in town is posted at 25 mph, Ellis believes speeding is an issue on many other roads in town, even those that are not major feeder roads but largely serve neighborhoods. He said the committee might expand the use of the Spy Boxes in those areas as well.

Barring that, he said, simply convincing people to obey the law would cut down largely on the problem.

“If we could get people to slow down, to be more mindful, the town wouldn’t need to spend more money.”


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here