Just after Thanksgiving I posted about my observations of traffic on the highways and byways both in my home state of New Hampshire and neighboring Massachusetts over the lengthy Thanksgiving weekend. I thought what I saw might nave been primarily because of the holiday, people wanting to get to their Thanksgiving dinner and home again as well as Black Friday and Local Shops Saturday.
It turns out I was wrong.
I have been on vacation since December 11th, burning up almost 3 weeks of vacation time I had on the books. My employer has a “Use it or Lose it” policy when it comes to vacation time so I decided to use it. Not that it would put a strain on my employer as December tends to be one of the slowest months for us, so it wasn’t likely I’d be leaving anyone in the lurch. In any case, this means I had a lengthy amount of time to observe traffic as I traveled quite a bit before, during, and after Christmas.
What I saw during Thanksgiving wasn’t an anomaly.
My latest trip was earlier today down to New Hampshire’s Seacoast to celebrate the birthday of my Dear Brother’s wife. It was a 90 minute trip between the lake and the seacoast.
I saw the same thing both down and back – people traveling at well above the posted limit. Post speed limits on the divided highways were either 55 or 65 MPH. No one was driving at or near the posted limits, including me. Even in the right lanes I was traveling at 70 to 75 MPH and still being overtaken. In a few cases I had to travel at 80 MPH in order to keep up with the ‘other’ slower traffic.
At least the two-lane highways I traveled didn’t experience that. Most people were driving at the posted speed limit or slightly above.
One saving grace was that the highways were not busy. Traffic was moderate at worst, usually at the junctions of some of the major highways in the state. The rest was relatively light. No traffic jams. No bumper to bumper traffic. No backups at traffic lights.
Yes, it’s still vacation time for a lot of people so I wouldn’t expect traffic to be all that heavy until the end of next week. But It’s still disconcerting to see the much higher speeds, particularly when I know that quite a few of the drivers are driving distracted. (Yes, I saw more than a few examples of that over the past couple of weeks.)
I have to think the State Police will be cracking down on the excessive speeds at some point.
I really like to think that will be the case. Really.
