Letters

I noted with interest the Page 1 story that Southampton Town Police will be targeting speeding on County Road 39 [“Southampton Town Police Plan Crackdown on Speeders Along County Road 39,” 27east.com, February 5]. Complaints from local residents have spurred the action. Whether they’re trying to cross the street on foot or enter the main artery from a side street, it’s harder and harder to find a safe moment to make your move. Of course, safety first.

I earned my driver’s license 55 years ago and, let’s be honest, it’s a rarity of the first order to find someone actually observing the speed limit. Whether it’s 25 mph in Westhampton Beach or 55 mph on the Long Island Expressway or Sunrise Highway, drivers routinely exceed the posted speed limit, and by considerable degrees. And, with today’s highly comfortable seating and internal environment controls, you can’t easily tell whether you’re going 30 or 70 mph.

More to the point, advanced technology in today’s cars creates a fundamentally safer driving experience than in, say, 1969, when I passed my driving test — with no technology, no seat belts (much less airbags) and gum-rubber tires.

Speeding isn’t just on County Road 39. It’s everywhere, and it’s rampant.

Now, people aren’t fundamentally walking across the street any faster or differently than they have in, say, 1969, so there’s the very dangerous mismatch. While pedestrian mortality rates in the U.S. are actually falling, at least through 2023, which was the latest data I could find, it is nonetheless a fundamentally dangerous equation: more drivers, more pedestrians, higher speeds.

However, there’s something perhaps more dangerous; call it selective obedience of the law. If everyone’s speeding, everyone is taking a law — in this case, the speed limit — and selecting it as a law that they will ignore. Speeding can be rationalized away, but I posit that selective obedience leads to selective disobedience. As a society, that can be problematic and maybe already is.

Solution? Enforce the speed limit or raise it to reflect modern technologies. Raising it doesn’t address the safety issues noted in the story. In fact, it institutionalizes it as a fact of life. But selective disobedience isn’t something we want, as a society, to institutionalize either.

Law enforcement and elected officials need to have a serious discussion about selective obedience/disobedience. Using drones and pace cars, as noted in the story, are surveillance techniques. Are they permanent solutions or …?

Vincent Pica

Westhampton Beach