I don’t understand where I live. Don’t get me wrong, I like it—in fact, I love it. Hell, I chose to live here. Well, Top Management chose for me, but I could have objected. It wouldn’t have done any good, but I still COULD have.
I didn’t, though, and I’m extremely happy with our house, our neighborhood, our area—everything. The whole kit and kaboodle. Except maybe for the roads.
It’s the oddest thing. The speed limits here are almost uniformly five to fifteen miles per hour faster than they would be on a similar road in New York or Connecticut. A winding road through the countryside which might be, say, 40 or 45 miles per hour in Connecticut will be 55 here. The main street in a small neighborhood development: 20 or 25 in New York, 30 mph here. The tiny residential sidestreets, with only a dozen houses? Five, maybe ten miles per hour up north, 20 mph here.
And it’s not just Connecticut and New York, although those are the two other states I know best. My time spent in Colorado would indicate that, in the Denver region at least, it’s the same thing: speed limits lower on average than here (although they do have a wicked 75mph speed limit on I-70 in some places).
I don’t understand. It’s clearly not that folks up there love their kids more than the people down here. And it’s not that northerners are averse to driving fast, as anyone who’s spent even the slightest bit of time up there knows. So what is it? What accounts for the discrepancy? The speed limit on the beautiful, windy, hilly road that takes us into town is the same as the speed limit on major interstates. What’s up with that?
Is it maybe just an instinctive distrust of government? Folks down here don’t like people telling them what to do; they’d prefer to say for themselves what the damn speed limit is, whereas there’s a history of strong government up there, from the days of Tammany Hall on down?
I dunno. And, as I said, I don’t understand. It’s really, really odd. And it’s not like the folks up there stick strictly to the speed limit, but then again, neither do the folks down here, not even close, even what the speed limit itself’s unsafe. I don’t get it.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that they build ditches for the rainwater next to roads—hello, people! Gutters! Sewers! Radical new inventions!
Comments