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The trip to Honesdale from Ossining is estimated by Google maps to be 108 miles and about 2½ hours in duration. I took this trip with my wife this summer to attend a wedding, and it took us about 30-40 minutes longer than the google estimate. The reason being that I tried to travel at least five miles below the speed limit on every road and travel at 45 mph on I-287 and I-84. Let me assure you from the start, the idea of traveling at 45 mph on the interstate did not work. Even at 55 (the new upper limit I set on the trip) it felt scary when semis, at their 75-80 mph speed and tens of thousands of pounds of mass, bore down on our little Toyota Corolla.
 The Toyota Corolla at the Wedding in Honesdale, PA,
About 22 years ago I had a similar experience when I rode my silver Honda Elite 150 from Indianapolis, Indiana to Miami, Oklahoma. On that trip, the only vehicle I passed was a truck that was traveling uphill about 2 mph slower than me. I would not even have attempted to pass that truck except that this was a hay truck with seven or eight layers of hay bales stacked on its bed, and I was petrified that a bale of hay could fall off and crush me if I continued to tag along behind him. As I was waiting for a hill that was long enough for me to pass him, I had more than one thought about a possible headline in the local paper; something to the effect: “Dumb Hoosier, Killed by Errant Hay Bale.”
Of course, the fear of being crushed by a tethering hay bale was nothing compared with the panic that set-in once a hail storm began later in the trip. I was fortunate that when it started hailing; I was only a few hundred feet away from an exit and a warm and safe motel. As soon as the precipitation started coming down I pulled off the road, got a room, and then watched from the comfort and safety of it as baseball-sized hail peppered the landscape.
Forty years ago, the summer I got my first driving license, I was traveling from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Mt. Kisco, New York for my first job after graduating from college. It was a Sunday, the day after I passed my road test, and I was about to start teaching at Fox Lane High School’s summer session. My vehicle was my fiancée’s VW Bug, which could only achieve 55 mph on the Connecticut down hills. Going uphill I was worried about maintaining the state’s minimum. However, I was so nervous about a possible accident that all I was concerned about was arriving at my destination in one piece, and I was not worried about passing anyone, or speeding.
Between these three driving episodes I had the opportunity to drive on 3 continents, 12 countries and 30 states. I loved the German Autobahn with its lack of speed limits and the ever-present beer machines at rest stops. One of my memorable moments was driving our commanding colonel’s staff car over 100 mph on this road as I visited our outlying Army hospitals in preparation to sending one of them to help Jordan’s King Hussein in his battle against the Palestinians. My favorite memory in the U.S. is going 90-100+ mph around the hills of Midland, Texas on a summer evening with the top removed from my Fiat X1/9. The road was serpentine, black and smooth like licorice, with the evening sun adding warmth of color to the landscape that I have not experienced again.
These peak moments of speeding were counterbalanced by episodes such as the 12 hour day driving the 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Plitvice to Shibennik (Yugoslavia) on rutted dirt roads with the only paved stretches running thought the villages. One could not even go smoothly on that part of the road because in almost all cases the pavement was used by the old men in the village as their bocce court. We would stop, wait till the set was over, wave, and drive on. The only consolation in such a trip is the humor one derived from the Baedeker instructions for finding the correct turnoff on the road, “… You will see two unpaved roads going to the left. The road at the head of which (on the right) there is an old oak tree is the one to take. …” There is also the memory of the mountain road (more like a goat track) in Greece that was just wide enough for our VW Beetle, and I prayed that there would be no oncoming car, or even people on that road.
If I ever added up the various incidents and “adventures” with the different autos owned, borrowed and rented in the past forty years, and the interesting places visited in these vehicles, one could write a sizeable chapter in a memoir. Alternatively, a travelogue of some length could also come out of such an exercise, perhaps as interesting as Kerouac’s On the Road. Throughout all these adventures two invariables remained rather constant for some time: driving, on occasion, after excessive drinking and speeding. Fortunately, the mixing of alcohol and driving ceased in 1984 when a second marriage prompted a commitment to stay away from “Demon Rum,” so as to ensure a long-lived marriage. That idea worked, the marriage lasted and there was one less menace on American and foreign roads. The tendency to speed, however, lasted to recent times.
The trip to Honesdale, this summer, was a culmination of a commitment I made earlier when grappling with ways to cut our cost of transportation and express a desire to show directly, unambiguously, and permanently my unwillingness to be fleeced by oil companies. I never imagined to reversing the excessive costs of gasoline by my actions, but I figured at least I could minimize the fleecing.
The original operational idea was simple—to travel five mph below the speed limit and not to exceed 45 mph on interstates. For a few weeks I experimented on my normal daily commute, and the idea worked pretty well. The only questionable part was the commitment to the 45 mph limit when traveling on the Taconic Parkway. Though posted at 55 mph, only a few folks travel at 65 and many drivers exceed 75 mph, such as a friend of mine who admitted to traveling at 88 mph on the highway.
Fortunately, however, in New York State trucks and other commercial vehicles are not allowed on parkways, and since I always travel in the extreme right-hand lane, few passenger cars take notice. Every once-in-a-while, some idiot will get behind me and with two perfectly good lanes available for speeding, he will flash his lights. I just marvel at this arrogant stupidity, and wonder if the driver even has an inkling that the technique of flashing lights to indicate an intention to pass came from Europe in the 1960’s, mainly as a courtesy to drivers sharing the common three-lane roads, where the middle lane is the passing lane for both directions of traffic. This sign of courtesy and safety became a mark of impatience and arrogance in the U.S., and was made possible when imports, with their light switches mounted on the steering wheel, made this communication mode common.
 Author’s truck “resting.”
Final experimentation on the trip to Honesdale proved that the goal of traveling at 45 on major highways was impractical. So, I kept adjusting my driving until I achieved a workable balance between my initial goals and the realities of traveling on America’s roads. The final program that I developed consists of the following parts:
1) Don’t drive over the speed limit.
2) Try, whenever possible, to drive five miles below the speed limit.
3) Don’t drive over 55 miles per hour in any case, except in very special circumstances, and then for the minimum time possible.
These three rules achieved my initial goal without endangering my life, or proving to be a driving hazard/nuisance. I achieved an overall 15-18% increase in mileage (even with constant use of air conditioning in the summer). In essence, every seventh fill-up was paid for by money saved in driving conservatively.
To compensate for the loss of efficiency by driving 55 instead of the planned 45, I really focused on driving style. I am fortunate to have a tachometer and cruise control in my vehicle. By ensuring that my engine rpm (revolutions per minute) seldom go above 2,000, and attempting stay in the range of 1,500-2,000, as well as using the cruise control whenever possible, I am assured of the most efficient use of my engine.
As an interesting by-product of this approach I observed that most automatic transmission cars (mine is a manual transmission) have their shift points in the same range. This discovery gave me confidence and helped explain the frustration I used to feel when I would accelerate to 3,500 rpm, only to be slowed down by a vehicle still traveling at lower rpm. The cruise control helps minutely adjust the throttle; it does it much more consistently and precisely than I could do manually. I feel fortunate to have it. My wife’s older model Toyota Corolla lacks the cruise control, and I find it much more difficult to keep to the 55 limit and to keep the throttle modulations in line with changes in the terrain (who would ever think of a Toyota Corolla s being overpowered?).
My new approach to driving not only helped achieve the immediate goals but also contributed to the following societal and unexpected benefits: 1) lessening of carbon emissions, 2) total relaxation in terms of fearing speeding tickets, 3) largely empty roads to travel on (because I am the slowest car on the road everyone passes me, I have the highway to myself most of the time), 4) an opportunity to much more closely observe the surroundings, 5) because of the increase in travelling time over distances a greater opportunity to meet people one otherwise would not encounter, and 6) a much more rested mind, and body, when I arrive at my destination.
While I have no idea how many tons of carbon dioxide are emitted by my vehicle over each 100 miles traveled, I know that it must be substantial (I drive a Mazda 4 cylinder pickup truck). The gas savings of nearly 20% must reflect a similar diminution of carbon emissions. In Europe, vehicle manufacturers are mandated to publish the carbon emission of their vehicles, and there is a European Union-wide program to lower these emissions, as well as to increase the gas mileage of all vehicles.
 Unintended humor. Putnam County, NY,
I didn’t realize, in those decades of crazy driving, that the real payment came in other ways than just speeding tickets. The constant attention, vigilance, and the continual nervousness whenever I saw a police ca all contributed to an ever-present level of stress and habitually hunched shoulders. The payment for speeding was spiritual and emotional, as well as financial.
In those days I also did not worry about the amount of gasoline I was burning needlessly, or about the amount of carbon dioxide I was emitting. This is despite the fact that as early as 1966, I was already aware of the growing ozone hole around Antarctica. However, since I always drove “economy” models, and usually sub-compacts, I felt that in comparison to everyone else, I was being responsible. This deluded thinking followed me until gas prices this summer forced me to reconsider my position.
Today I live in a different reality. I don’t look at the police car sitting at the side of the road as a threat or as an enemy. In fact, were it not for my fear of drawing too much attention to myself and possibly be misunderstood I would happily wave to the trooper holding a lonely vigil. And that brings me to the next point—being alone.
In all the years of speeding, I constantly aspired to a stretch of the road where there was no competition with other cars. At times, this has been accomplished simply for a lack of other cars on the road. I remember hours alone on the turnpike in Kansas, or hours of struggling against the headwind on the plateaus of central Spain, or the desolate periods experienced in winter in upstate New York and Vermont during the gas crisis of the 1970’s. But usually my attempts to ‘”outrun” the immediate pack always ran into the difficulty of then having to vend my way through another pack a few miles and minutes later.
That is all changed. I go along at my chosen speed, and don’t even notice cars that pass me by. I spend the vast majority of my time either totally by myself i.e., having, either both or all three, lanes empty, or I suffer a brief swarm of buzzing vehicles before they speed off into the distance, and I am left to my own thoughts and observations. I do have to share the road with other drivers in traffic jams, but I have opted out of competing for being at the “head of the pack.” While others switch lanes and do other things to eke out some imagined advantage, I plod along happily until the jam clears. Just like anyone else, I am not happy when the bottleneck moves along at a crawl, but I am perfectly content when it travels at and very happy when it goes along at 45 mph—my ideal speed.
 Autumn morning. Westchester County, NY,
There is no question that the new mode of driving increases time on the road. In my case, the average has gone up by approximately 25%. That could be a negative aspect to this new approach to driving, but if one looks more closely it turns into a real blessing. One great aspect of spending more unhurried time on the road is the opportunity to meet folks whom one would rush-by previously. Once one is committed to the idea that it will take longer to go from point A to point B, a certain kind of impatience disappears. One takes more breaks, one dawdles a bit more on breaks, and one is much more apt to engage in friendly conversation.
A case in point came up this past Thanksgiving weekend. My wife and I were traveling to visit our youngest daughter and her family. On the way there, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner. We had our dinner, and since we were no longer in any hurry we had a nice chat with our waitress. It turned out that she was a mother of two and that this was her second job, which she kept in order to help her daughter go to college. We talked a bit about kids, book costs, etc. and the woman with great disgust in her voice volunteered that her daughter’s college bookstore offered to buy back the used textbooks at five dollars each so that they could re-sell them, again, at $60. This disparity between buy and sell prices made our waitress really angry, and she went on to say that she told her daughter to give away the books for free rather than allow herself to be exploited by the bookstore.
 Unintended humor near Concord, NH,
This brings me to the last benefit noted. That benefit is that one is much more rested and recovers much faster from road weariness than travelling at speed. This phenomenon must be both physiological and psychological. I attribute this phenomenon to the significant reduction in stress, by foregoing the “rat race.” In a strange and quirky way the decrease in speed actually helps one to arrive earlier by making one’s full presence more easily and fully available sooner. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”
As I was writing this piece a new benefit became apparent, one that I failed to list initially, but one that has great significance in my life. This benefit is the comfort that my new driving habits have given my wife. For years she has been quietly driving at speed limit, sometimes to the great annoyance to those who follow her. My hard accelerations and constant violation of speed limits disturbed her whenever she traveled as a passenger. However, she kept her silence most of the time, and I conveniently ignored the signs of discomfort she exhibited. My new style of driving is more comforting to her, and I can feel her become much more relaxed as we travel. For more than two decades she has suffered in silence, and I am glad that now she is a happier passenger.
Admittedly my experience with following the speed limit is still relatively new. After experiencing the first winter, further adjustments to the original program may be in order. But, somehow, I think that with the addition of possible changes to reflect winter driving, the essence of the program will remain for the rest of my driving days. The reason for this confidence is that while my original intent for commencing this way of driving was rather simple and quantifiable (I wanted to cut my transportation costs) the ensuing benefits of this commitment are much more—in a deeper and more spiritual realm. Were this decision merely financial, the recent dramatic price drop in gasoline costs would have one revert to old patterns of driving. But that has not happened because the intangible benefits are so much greater than just the financial rewards. What is it worth to have your wife ride with you feeling more secure and safe?
In our normal discourse we think of the word “mindfulness” as an equivalent of the word “awareness,” or as being attentive to a matter. In Buddhism mindfulness encompasses the same understandings, but goes further in specifying concentrated awareness of thoughts, actions and motivations. The concept of mindfulness is very important in Buddhism, and it is the seventh step of the “Noble Eightfold Path” by which the Buddha promises that life’s suffering can be overcome.
 Autumn morning moon on the Taconic Parkway, NY,
In the Buddhist understanding of the term “mindfulness,” we have a concentrated attentiveness that is the right action for a situation, and in this understanding the right action is always the one that leads to the lessening of suffering of others and oneself. Mindfulness, as used here, is the transformation of a potentially negative reality into a positive reality through concentrated attention and right action. Driving 55 is mindfulness.
In driving 55, mindfulness transforms two negative qualities, impatience and competitiveness, i.e. the desire to vanquish someone, or to show how much better one is than another person. Impatience, in my book, is a form of intolerance and even greed. To be impatient with a driver who is slow because of a faulty or old auto, is a kind of intolerance of differences; so is the impatience with an older driver, who may not have the reflexes of a 20 year-old. It is little different than being impatient with a foreigner struggling with a new language while forgetting the years it took one to master that same language.
 Winter on the Taconic near Kent, NY,
The desire to go faster than the car next to you is competitiveness, and in non-race driving it has few benefits. Will beating the car to the traffic light at which both will have to wait the same amount of time really make you feel better about the illness of a dying friend? Does driving from New York to Boston in two hours really help anything or anyone? Is killing a deer because you drove too fast to stop in time a good outcome of that feeling of competitiveness? Do people feel better, more peaceful, and more loving when they feel vanquished by your superior car or driving prowess? And do you feel better about yourself when you outrace a grey-haired driver?
I know that when I finished the Marine Corps Marathon and discovered that an 84 year-old man had finished a whole hour ahead of me, I laughed with pleasure and joy and wished I could have seen him and shaken his hand. I was not running to compete with him, but to win over my feelings of resistance to the discipline of this sport. And I did win—I trained, competed and finished, even though a man 30 years my senior posted a better time.
It would seem that there should have been no need for the foregoing essay. Why talk about economic, ecological, and psychic benefits of following the speed limit when it is simply a matter of law? One would think that law—the most tangible part of a culture’s social contract would be sufficient to achieve the ends enumerated. However, as a recent article found on Drive55.org website indicates, over 80% of drivers observed recently on the New York Thruway violate the speeding laws. There are many reasons for this state of affairs, not the least of which are roads that are engineered to accommodate traffic going well in excess of the speed limit. Perhaps the most important aspect of this system of enabling the current state of affairs, is the fact that the likelihood of suffering an easily perceivable and direct negative consequence for wrong behavior is so slight.
In nearly 40 years of driving, usually going above the speed limit, I have received a total of 4 speeding tickets, one of which was a warning. And despite the fact that in nearly 20 years of driving I would, on occasion, drive while intoxicated I was never stopped, or received a ticket for that offense. In the past twenty years, attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed substantially, and it probably would be much more likely that I would be stopped for that now if I were still violating the law in this manner.
In large part, attitudes towards drinking and driving were fundamentally affected by grassroots organizations such as MADD. It is my hope that speeding-oriented organizations such as Drive55.org will create a similar kind of cultural and legal imperative for a sane approach to driving.
In my case, the recent cost disincentive served as the initial inspiration (moment of awakening) for my change in behavior. It is my contention that, if other disincentives are structured into our daily driving reality, more of us would be motivated to become law-abiding and thereby create greater social benefits, and experience some of the rewards outlined in this piece.
 The author’s truck ready for the road
Nick’s Top 10 Auto Policy Recommendations
1) National Speed Limit of 55mph.
2) Equip all commercial vehicles (including school buses) with governors set for 55 mph. maximum.
3) Automatically issue speeding tickets to vehicles that traverse a toll road in a timeframe indicating speeding.
4) Make speeding by any commercial vehicle in excess of 10 mph over speed limit punishable by a 30 day suspension of license.
5) Make speeding and simultaneous use of cell phone in any vehicle punishable by a 90 day suspension of license.
6) Install rumble strips on key sections of highways and other streets which would vibrate a vehicle whenever it goes faster than the posted speed limit.
7) Institute a program to convert all commercial vehicles to natural gas within 5 years.
8) Set all vehicle taxes, fees, and insurance rates with increasing premiums based on engine displacement.
9) Institute programs of congestion pricing in any city over 150,000 in population
10) Ban trucks from roads in cities (population 75,000+) and for 25 miles outside between the hours of 5 AM to 10AM and 4PM to 8PM.
Nikolai Burlakoff, Ossining, NY
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