"The basic premise is to slow down cars through the design of the road rather than through enforcement," Jack Molenaar, the county's principal transportation planner, told the Courier News.

Unfortunately, that paper followed up the announcement of the initiative with an editorial doubting whether traffic calming efforts were worthwhile on clogged Somerset roads -- essentially writing off the future of the area it serves.

At least one Somerset town, Rocky Hill, is already leading a fight to calm an arterial highway. Governor Whitman agreed recently to reduce speed limits on Route 518. Now Rocky Hill wants more sidewalks and crosswalks on the route (see MTR 141). Somerset County has a comprehensive sidewalk survey it makes available to towns when opportunities for filling in sidewalk network gaps arise.