To the Editor:

I was recently run over by an SUV or truck while in the crosswalk at the intersection of Woodlawn Avenue and Franklin Street in Vineyard Haven. The guy who hit me was so busy looking right and left for the speeding cars that roar up and down Franklin that he didn’t see me in the middle of the Woodlawn crosswalk almost in front of him. He gunned it and splat, I became a human speed bump.

As I lay on the ground, I could hear him out there somewhere saying, “I never saw him; I never saw him.” I genuinely felt his deep distress. When I entered the crosswalk I could see the front of his car sitting behind the stop sign with no sign of moving. All I could tell the policemen and EMTs is that I felt the car hit me and run over my arm and “some other part of my body,” but I couldn’t tell which part. It turned out to be my right hip. I heard the vehicle’s wheel make the sound of running over a speed bump. I remembered my head hit the asphalt hard. Later I found a sore spot and bump on the other side of my head, so I must have also whacked it somewhere on the vehicle. The police and EMTs were prompt, compassionate, and professional. Definitely, all Five Stars–plus. I was x-rayed at the ER, and showed no fractures except for one on my wrist, and no bleeding inside my skull. My arm was a bit messed up, and I had a huge bump across my hip, which no one but my wife was interested in looking at. She calls it my “tire tracks.”

On Sunday, we had to park on Franklin again for a large funeral service at Grace Church. The crosswalk was brightly painted, and I did pretty well walking across it. But when I had to return to my car and drive home alone, I had a hard time, as usual, getting into it on the driver’s side. I waited and waited, plastered up against the driver’s-side door without opening it. But, as usual, the cars coming from West Chop buzzed by. None of them ever slowed down. Finally I opened the door a bit, and they continued as before. Most stayed completely in my lane even when the other lane was clear.

Anyone who has ever parked regularly on Franklin between Woodlawn and St. Augustine’s must have experienced this, as I have for decades; must have felt, as I have, at least once that concern about being clipped by, or at least having one’s car door torn off. I must confess that over the years, I have projected unfairly that all West Chop drivers must be “Type A personalities” and act as if they have some strange kind of entitlement to control the use of their street even by making it difficult to for others to enter it or park cars. I apologize for thinking that.

Once we lived on an island in Tampa Bay with a road that forced cars to turn right or left (or drive over the seawall). The seawall was about a half-mile beyond our house. Many cars would fly by going 50 to 55 mph. Every year or so, I’d be looking out my window at night and see white lights flash up into the sky, and then red taillights pop up and then disappear as they drove over the seawall. I’d call 911 and then the hospital ER down the street and tell them that “another car just drove off the seawall.” Fortunately, there’s nothing like that at the end of Franklin. Perhaps I’m just collateral damage. I don’t have time to edit or shorten this since I’m supposed to not be reading and limiting my screen time, and I am cheating. You know more than I do about this street problem and possible solutions. I’m just making personal the consequences of doing nothing. I can’t think of anything terribly useful; perhaps putting in posted speed-limit signs, or something that one would do in a school or pedestrian zone that shows how fast one is going, or making physical changes to bushes, trees, and that broken asphalt sidewalk on Woodlawn that ends at Franklin. Thank you for allowing this speed bump to complain.

Les Holcomb

Edgartown