The following letter to the editor was submitted by Andover resident Jesse Jacobson, who holds a PhD in transportation systems from MIT. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Andover News. You can learn more about our policy on opinion and commentary on our Mission and Policies page.
Many of the roads in Andover have a uniform speed-limit of 25mph because they are thickly settled. But, surprisingly, some thickly-settled roads have higher speed limits. This happens because of what I call the cowboy assumption.
The cowboy assumption dictates that the speed limit should be whatever feels comfortable to most drivers. Sure, fifteen percent (a codified but arbitrary number) of those cowboy-drivers are dangerous because they drive too fast. But the remaining 85% of the cowboy-drivers are bellwether drivers and we often should accept to set the speed limit at the speed that feels comfortable to them. Some call it a “reasonable” speed limit. I call it a recipe for disaster.
And then there is the practice that blindly accepts high speed limits that were set sometime back in the historical midpoint of the automobile era. For example, the Andover Select Board continues debating whether to reduce the speed limits set on Lovejoy Road in 1966 (that is 58 years ago). And this is over two years after the Andover voters chose to reduce the speed limits in thickly settled roads to 25mph.
The year 1966 was the era of the Volkswagen Beetle. The year 2024 is the era of the Ford F150 series of trucks. Do you see the difference in the “destructive ramming power”? The year 1966 was also at the dawn of the interstate era and of the roar of the suburbs. And 2024 is the era of the spillovers into Andover from the stalled I-93 and I-495.
So, does the policy that effectively encourages high speed limits in the Andover roads in 2024 promote perverse incentives such as spillovers? You bet. Do “reconstruction” projects like Route 133 encourage spillovers from the interstates because they improve the flow of vehicles through intersections? You bet. Those spillovers are now a daily fact of life for Andover. Reducing speed limits in town and abandoning projects that “improve” network capacity would no-doubt make spillovers less appealing.
Remember that you cannot measure the vibrancy of a suburban town by the increase in AADT (Average Annual Daily Traffic). On the contrary, an increase in AADT symbolizes roadways that are dangerous to all vehicles and inaccessible to vulnerable users, such as pedestrians and bicyclists. And adding a short length of a shared path (pedestrians and bicyclists), no matter how wide, is only putting a tiny band-aid on the issue of town-wide accessibility for residents.
Jesse Jacobson
Andover
About the author: Even before graduating with a civil engineering degree, the author participated in a major forensic study of 10 fatal freeway crashes. After earning a PhD in Transportation Systems from MIT, he worked for a few years at a research unit of the US Department of Transportation. He was also briefly the subject-matter expert at USDOT for Right-Turn-on-Red. He works closely with George Thorlin, the founder of Andover Safe Streets.
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