HOLLY — After nearly eight years of careful observation, local resident Diane Mercer has assembled an extensive collection of vehicles that were definitely speeding past her house, despite having never measured the speed of any of them.
The collection, stored primarily on Mercer’s phone, includes more than 300 photographs and doorbell-camera screenshots of vehicles she says were traveling “way too fast” when they passed her home.
“That one was doing at least 50,” Mercer said, enlarging a slightly blurry photograph of a gray Chevrolet Equinox. “You can tell.”
Mercer said she can usually hear when a vehicle is moving too fast before it reaches the house. She then watches how quickly it passes the front window, a method she said has become increasingly reliable after 17 years of living along the road.
Her husband, Mark, said most of the vehicles are probably traveling somewhere around the speed limit, though he acknowledged he stopped offering independent estimates several years ago.
“It wasn’t helping anything,” he said.
The oldest vehicle in Mercer’s collection is a red pickup photographed in 2018 that she estimates was traveling “at least 60, maybe 65,” based largely on how irritated she still becomes whenever she sees the picture.
Mercer said traffic has improved somewhat in recent months. Several motorists now appear to slow down as they approach her house.
“Which proves they know exactly what they were doing,” she said.