VOLUNTEERS Part 2

We received continual complaints about "speeders", particularly on Crayton Road in the City. It wasn't a genuine problem. The speed limit was 30 mph and few exceeded it. But the folks that lived along that street, with not much to do and a whole lotta time to do it in, invented a problem. As folks, with no real problems, are apt to do. So speeders became an issue.

The real problem was regular citizens can't estimate speed worth a flip. It takes cops a while to learn how. A bored citizen, lounging on their front porch, would perceive any vehicle traveling over granny speed to be burning up the road. Then they called in. And we would respond, and waste time trying to catch nonexistent culprits. Something need to be done.

We came up with an idea to put our many volunteers to good use. We taught a handful how to use the radar speed reading device. Then, we'd put several of them, who lived in the Crayton Road area, out as a team to do traffic studies. They would record the speed of every passing car for a day. This was done in shifts, so several had an opportunity to participate. It didn't take them long to realize that 30 mph on a residential street was a lot faster than they'd imagined.

Word got around their community, and our calls dropped almost to zero. After all, their own neighbors who'd recorded the speeds with a radar gun themselves had told them that speeding wasn't a problem.

That problem solved, the focus shifted. Even though the drivers weren't speeding, they were causing too many accidents on Crayton Road.

Time to shift gears. We assembled another team of volunteers to go over the accident reports for the previous year and record all those that happened on Crayton Road or contiguous streets. Didn't take them long to figure out their accident rate was almost zero.

Pleased with the success of our project, we decided to carry it a bit further. And that, as you'll see tomorrow, led to the NPD's first computer. Of sorts.