HADLEY — During the past two years, Rocky Hill Road resident Elizabeth Neill witnessed two different cars speeding down the windy street before flipping over off the road by her home.

“Thank goodness nobody got hurt,” Neill said. “Police oversight helps (with speeding), but they do it periodically. They (drivers) need to be surprised more.”

Concerned with a high amount of speeding complaints from Rocky Hill residents and a fatal crash on East Street two months ago, Hadley police Officer Will Delgado often starts his patrol shift by driving around on Rocky Hill Road and Route 9, hoping his presence will increase drivers’ awareness behind the wheel.

“We’re trying to have less accidents and less people can get hurt,” Delgado said. “I spend a lot of time on Route 9, just stopped on the side of the road, so that people can slow down. And it works — people see the cruiser and they’ll hit the brakes.”

If his presence isn’t enough slow drivers down, Delgado will pull over aggressive drivers to issue a warning or hand out a ticket, but that’s not his goal. Police Lt. Mitchell Kuc added he’d rather inform drivers about the dangers of speeding.

“We’re a commuter community with a brand new commuter group every college year,” Kuc said. “We’re constantly educating and re-educating drivers on the dangers of speeding.”

Speeding is one of the biggest challenges police departments face in communities throughout the region.

Nearly every police chief — from the rural roads of Belchertown to the bustling streets of Northampton — interviewed for this story said that speeding has been an issue since the day they joined the force.

Police departments invest in extra patrol shifts, secure grants for traffic enforcement and advocate for traffic-calming infrastructure to remind drivers that, as South Hadley Police Chief Jennifer Gundersen said in a recent guest column in the Gazette, the extra 30 seconds drivers save from speeding isn’t worth the safety risk.

But police cannot patrol every street all day, so chiefs like Gundersen are turning to residents and commuters alike, asking that they take a breath, remain diligent behind the wheel, and hit the brake instead of the gas pedal.

“(We) ask the public to be safer behind the wheel. Look out for their own safety and for the safety of everyone else,” said interim Easthampton Police Chief Dennis Scribner. “I would agree that people need to be more mindful of their driving and everyone’s safety.”

Gundersen wrote that “driving habits have changed for the worse” in South Hadley, and she’s received a speeding complaint from nearly every street in town — even dead end roads. Scribner can’t say whether aggressive driving has worsened, but he echos Gundersen’s observations about why drivers speed.

“I think it’s similar to what she (Gundersen) had said about people feeling more secure in their vehicles, feeling isolated in their cars from the outside, talking about more power vehicles and people not paying attention to speed limit and speed limit signs,” he said. “People are just rushing. Back when I used to stop a lot of cars, that was a typical excuse: late for work, late for appointments.”

While speeding complaints come in regularly, the location and source of complaints isn’t as consistent. In the past couple months, a group of residents on West Street in Easthampton have attended the City Council’s Public Safety Committee meetings, reporting that drivers speeding down their streets have destroyed mailboxes, hit parked cars and run over several cats.

“I think that this behavior is not just West Street, it’s everywhere,” Sherry Lee, a West Street resident who works in trauma care, told city councilors. “Based on the work I do, we’ve been seeing an increase post-COVID of high-speed traffic accidents because people are just blatantly disregarding the law. On our street, it almost feels like they’re confrontational about it.”

Scribner said he’s working with the Director of Public Works to add speed signs and paint white fog lines to narrow West Street, which helps slow cars. The city is also incorporating radar flashing signs and pedestrian flashing beacons along Union Street to make the main road safer for residents.

Many cities and towns also apply for state traffic enforcement grants, which provides the funds to hire police officers or add patrol shifts dedicated to traffic enforcement. Scribner noted that some officers focus on specific aspects of road safety, from pedestrian and cyclist protection to distracted driving, but officers always keep an eye out for aggressive driving and speeders.

Speeding is also an issue in Northampton, and has been for years.

“We have a whole list of streets that residents feel there are speeding concerns,” Police Chief John Cartledge said. “So we’ll send officers out on something called a directed patrol. Every shift, the dispatcher will tell the area officers, if they have a directed patrol in their area, they’ll go out and run radar or do whatever the enforcement is.”

At the beginning of October, Belchertown received nearly $30,000 from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to support the Municipal Road Safety Program. The funds, according to Police Chief Kevin Pacunas, will allow the town to hire officers specifically for traffic enforcement, aggressive driving education and seat belt compliance.

Recently, the Select Board approved a joint request from Public Works and the Police Department to lower speed limits on statutory roads by 5 mph, hoping that it will get drivers to go 35 mph in a 25 mph zone, rather than 40 mph in a 30 mph zone.

“We get most of our complaints in the thickly settled side rows where people like to walk their dogs or they’re walking with their kids and there are cars speeding by,” Pacunas said “People are just in a hurry to get where they’re going. The population (of Belchertown) has doubled in the last 20 years. It’s the same number of streets, but twice as many drivers.”

Gundersen wrote that South Hadley should invest in traffic calming infrastructure such as speed bumps, narrower roads and wider sidewalks. The infrastructure towns do have on hand, such as radar signs, does help to alleviate speeding in Hadley and Belchertown, Scribner and Pacunas both said.

But, as Pacunas notes, putting speed bumps in the middle of major routes and highways isn’t a good option. Instead, he tells residents to keep reporting speeding and talking with police about where aggressive driving is the heaviest, so chiefs can schedule patrols accordingly.

“We’re kind of fortunate, our biggest issue is speeding,” Pacunas said. “It’s bad that we have that, but that’s the worst thing going on. It’s more of a quality of life issue.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.