Reporter John Terhune did an elegant job of summarizing the status quo on our state’s highways last week. Opening a report about a bill debated during a legislative committee hearing Wednesday, he wrote: “Speeders on Maine’s highways are used to scanning roadsides for lurking state troopers, ducking below the speed limit, then stepping back on the gas.”

Disagree with that statement if you dare.

In recent years, this editorial board has been a very vocal advocate for increased enforcement of road traffic regulations in Maine.

Unsurprisingly, we’re in complete favor of the recent proposal by a bipartisan group of state legislators to explore the automatic enforcement of speed limits in construction zones.

To take even a cursory glance through the historical record is to discover that placing limits on Maine’s motorists is a challenging business. 

The narrow scope of this impressive proposal — applying only to construction zones and asking only for a pilot program of limited duration — indicates that the legislators behind it understand the pitifully steep hill LD 1457 faces.

“This is not a sweeping mandate. It’s a test,” said Sen. Brad Farrin, R-Norridgewock. “It’s time to take a closer look at what technology can do.”

Spare a thought for these intelligent lawmakers as they are made, due to tightly held ideas about freedom, surveillance, privacy and self-determination, to pretend that we don’t know, in 2025, exactly what speed cameras can do. 

As envisioned here, their introduction can reasonably discourage drivers from charging through short and infrequent stretches of highway where people are working on our roads at considerable personal risk, where surfaces are uneven and the physical margin for error is at its narrowest.

We know by now that “awareness campaigns” aren’t going to cut it. Maine drivers know all too well that speed limits are treated as optional, that they are widely and recklessly ignored. 

In order to promote caution, to defend the driving and laboring public, in order to slow people down so that the risk of injury and death is reduced, there has to be a potential penalty. Not even the most sophisticated philosophical argument should tip the scale against this.