Plainsboro’s township committee voted last month to lower the speed limit on Edgemere Avenue, in a residential area in the center of town and next to a school, from 35 mph to 25 mph. The change will take effect later this summer.
Getting a speed limit reduced is no easy feat, but it has become easier because of a change in the law in 2008. As the Princeton Packet noted, township engineers now can change speed limits without DOT approval. They just need approval from their engineering department and governing bodies. This should encourage all of us who want speed limits reduced on other roads.
Edgemere Avenue is getting roadway improvements, including repaving, and new speed limit signs will be installed followed by the police conducting an educational enforcement campaign.
Tags: Edgemere Avenue, Plainsboro, speed limits
It’s also entirely amusing that they think that repaving the road to be smoother and slapping a side street speed limit down will slow traffic down. Yeah, right. The only reason most traffic wasn’t going over 40 is because the road is bumpy. Now people will speed up even further. What will most likely happen is a year or two of attempted enforcement (there arent many places to hide on Edgemere Ave) and then they’ll just give up. It happened with Plainsboro Rd. in Cranbury where it turns to 25 mph…I used to see cops there all the time but not any more and people still go 40 through there. What would make the road safer would be to repave it but add gentle speed bumps that can be passed over safely at 30 mph, thereby making it uncomfortable for drivers to exceed the speed limit. I never really sped on this road, and its unfortunate that they’re punishing us who actually obeyed the limit by dropping it to an unreasonable level. Actually, this is now the first truly unreasonable speed limit in all of Plainsboro, I can’t think of a single other one with perhaps the exception of the 40 mph zone where Scudders Mill Rd. ramps onto Rt. 1 (and that one is not enforced at all). The local engineers don’t understand that posting a lower limit doesn’t lower the speed of traffic, and neither does enforcing it.
Dumb idea in my opinion, most people went at least reasonably close to it. This is the ‘intuitive’ solution to getting people to slow down, but as stated in another entry it doesn’t work. Posting a fair limit and enforcing it is more effective. It’s still a semi-major road and it shouldn’t have the same 25 mph limit as a side street. The worst part isn’t stuff like this, it’s when towns are able to lower rural limits to 30 or 35 and put up a major speed trap. As a result of this 2008 law, some roads are arbitrarily reduced because of resident complaints, while other ones are kept where they are because no one complained. The result is a system where limits are almost totally random and not according to any kind of logical standard; i.e. side streets 25, residential thruways 35, major thruways 45, etc.