This summer, I went on a camping trip/college visit to New Hampshire. I visited Keene State and the University of New Hampshire. Keene State was about 20 minutes away from our campsite, UNH about two hours.              

                Back here, I live about twenty  minutes away from URI.

                In pure mileage, Keene State is almost twice as far from the campsite as URI is from my house.

                How does this work?

                One answer: speed limits.

                The speed limit for most of Ministerial is 35 miles an hour, which is pretty fast for most single lane roads. Plus it’s not like anyone really goes 35, right? Most of the citizens of South Kingstown probably travel down most of Ministerial Rd. at about 40 miles per hour or above, thus disobeying the speed limit.

                Now, let’s flash back to New Hampshire: Keene and the campsite were interconnected by a hilly, twisty, single lane road with steady, but not busy traffic. There were homes and housing communities daintily placed along this scenic route.  This road sounds a lot like Ministerial to me.

                The speed limit was 50 mph for most of the trip.

                This saved gas (a big expense anywhere, but especially on a road trip), time, and inconvenience. People, for once, actually obeyed the speed limit, which you never see in Rhode Island. The longer I stayed, the more ridiculous the Rhode Island speed limit system became.

                The major highways were almost always 60 mph or over- and once again, almost everyone followed it. It became as highways should be– the left lane as a passing lane, the right as a travel lane—and often in the travel lane people went below the speed limit. The point is, everyone drove at a speed comfortable to themselves.

                Overall, driving on the trip became much less of an obstacle than it is here. People, as I said before, went at a speed that was actually comfortable and didn’t check their speedometer to make sure they weren’t going more than ten miles an hour over the speed limit all the time. We didn’t have to watch out for speed traps on the side of the road because we were obeying the speed limit, driving safely, and feeling comfortable about the speed we were going.

                It was clean, wholesome road travel—and we would have been going 20 over in Rhode Island.