Hump This

I remember once hearing about a job for which the description included driving around cities to find points where traffic and driving could be improved like sign placement, visibility, flow, etc. Driving as a newcomer in Gainesville makes me feel like one of those drivers who can quickly see parts of driving that could be improved.

First of all, I should point out that the city is generally an easy place to navigate as a newcomer because it is on a grid. (Though it does tend to disintegrate in the newer sections of town.) All avenues run east and west, streets north and south. There are no president names or tree names for the streets; they are all just numbers that increase as you travel away from Main Street or University Avenue, the two main axes of the grid. So you have to pay attention the letters in the address that indicate the quadrant (NW, NE, SW, SE) because there are two 12th Avenues, one that is North of University Ave. and one that is South of University Ave.

That said, the drivers here drive like they do on the California freeways. They are fast and impatient. Even on the city streets. I have only realized that the Northwest is a unique place where people generally obey the speed limit. I learned to drive in Moscow, Idaho so freeways freaked me out for a while (and still kind of do), but you always just accepted that the speed limit was 25 mph and there were two roads in town where you could go 35 mph (gasp!). If you got stuck behind someone slow, you just kind of accepted it; you didn’t swerve in and out of traffic to maintain your illegal speed because there weren’t any lanes to swerve in and out of.

However, most of the streets in Gainesville have a speed limit between 30-40 mph. I think most of the non-arterials are 30 mph, but there are even some arterials on which you can travel 45 mph. Everyone goes at least 5 mph over the speed limit though. The city has tried to address speeding by placing speed humps on the non-arterial streets, so Gainesville drivers aren't going 35 down the residential streets. I have only been here three weeks and the speed humps have already annoyed me enough to write about them. There is one in front of the house where I live that the city installed recently without informing the neighborhood. It irritates my landlord because it blocks drainage during rainstorms, causing a small lake to form.

Then there are the intersections where there is a 2-way stop and a speed bump on the road perpendicular to the stop signs. So you sit at the stop sign while the oncoming traffic slows down to go over the speed bump.

And here’s the best one. Most of the speed bumps are labeled with a sign that says SPEED HUMP 15 MPH. Down the street from my house is a speed bump with no warning sign but rather a sign posted right next to it that says 30mph. Even with the clearance on my car, there’s no way I’d want to go over that thing at 30 mph.

My point is that the speed bumps are not placed well. Yes, they slow down traffic, but it makes driving less fuel efficient because you have to keep accelerating and braking every two blocks if you drive off the main road. You especially don't need them where the cross-traffic is sitting at a stop sign. And it's such the American way of dealing with problems. Maybe they should enforce the speed limit to control speeding rather than blemish the city streets with these irksome bumps.