To the Editor:

One of the issues that Princeton residents in all parts of the municipality have voiced concerns about is speeding. Based on citizen complaints and their own observations, our police department deploys mobile signs that remind drivers of the speed limit and tracks how fast they are actually going. Through this citizen-driven process, we have collected a lot of data about the speed of traffic on different streets in the town. Speeding can be somewhat subjective; a large bus or truck on a narrow street can appear to be going substantially faster than it is actually going. And not every street that we collect data about appears to have, objectively, a major problem with speeding. But the collected data does reveal that there are definitely roads on which cars consistently go well over the posted speed limit.

So that brings us to the question, “What can we do about speeding?” To address this question, we would like to invite you all to a special Council meeting on speeding to be held on Monday, October 21 at 7 p.m. in the Council chamber at the Witherspoon Street Municipal Building (400 Witherspoon). We’ll have a presentation of the data that we’ve collected on speeding, photos of traffic calming measures already in place in town and some discussion about under what circumstances the speed limit can be lowered (this can only be done in limited cases for a number of reasons). We hope to then discuss with the public some possible solutions (traffic calming measures) that we can take to address the issue of speeding. We intend this process to be a data-driven, so that streets that have objectively the greatest problems with speeding will be addressed first in any plan that we develop.

We hope that you can join us on October 21; if you can’t attend but have input on this topic, please contact us and we will endeavor to include your perspective in our discussion.

Councilwomen Eve Niedergang and Jenny Crumiller
Ad Hoc Traffic Calming Committee on Behalf of Mayor and Council