Four months ago, the Newtown Police Commission adopted a traffic enforcement plan with four main goals: reduce the number and severity of traffic accidents, cut traffic congestion, reduce aggressive driving, and control speeding. Earlier this month, the commission followed up by shifting $20,000 within its budget to allow local patrol officers to devote 52 eight-hour shifts to traffic enforcement. The commission briefly considered doubling that expenditure, but Police Chief Michael Kehoe recommended against it, suggesting a more gradual start to the enforcement program — a program, he said this week, that will not start until next month.

We do not fully understand Chief Kehoe’s preference for gradualism given the high priority residents assigned to Newtown’s traffic problems in the comprehensive survey of local public opinion released in January by the Harrison Group. We do, however, applaud any effort, no matter how limited or tentative, to address speeding and aggressive driving in Newtown. Traffic law violations may seem like petty infractions in the grand scheme of crime, but they are among the few illegal acts committed in towns like ours that maim, disfigure, and kill people.

The Police Department is apparently already cracking down. There were 56 traffic enforcement stops made by local police in December; that number surged in January to 140. This spring, Newtown motorists are likely to see a variety of traffic enforcement tactics along local roadways designed to bring a measure of caution to the freewheeling habits of speeders. Look for marked, unmarked, and even unmanned police vehicles. And with the increased enforcement, many people will be surprised to learn that they, too, are part of the problem. It is not uncommon for the police to be called to a neighborhood to crack down on speeders only to end up ticketing the neighbors themselves. While it is true that posted speed limits on some roads (most notably Wasserman Way) are set unnecessarily low, most of us drift above the speed limits on our tightly scheduled errands around town. That is why the police are planning traffic safety educational campaigns in tandem with their ticketing campaigns.

Ultimately, it will be the combination of public consciousness-raising and aggressive ticketing that will slow people down. Both approaches, in time, should convince most of us that excessive speed on Newtown’s roads is not just a policing problem; it is our problem. And each of us can have a hand in solving the problem by slowing down just one car — the one we are driving.