The federal government has spent the past two and a half months chasing flies with sledgehammers. The drive to install speed cameras in Barrington school zones feels like a sledgehammer.

Claims of dangerous, unsafe school zones seem dubious. At peak drop-off and pickup times, school zones are clogged with traffic crawling to and away from the schools, buttressed by yellow-vested crossing guards keeping watch on everything. Those zones are blessed with wide sidewalks, many of them new, and with large, clearly marked crosswalks. Most of the school zones also have wide, open spaces that allow great visibility in all directions.

Everyone knows motorist behavior can vary widely. There will always be dolts who drive too fast and behave recklessly. Yet some of the same people who might drive 30 miles per hour during a school zone at 11 a.m. on a bright and sunny weekday morning without a child or pedestrian anywhere in sight, are the same people who drive 10 miles per hour while there are kids and pedestrians in the area.

In other words, the vast majority of drivers moderate their behaviors based on the circumstances at the time — without need of heavy-handed government oversight and intervention.

Humans today are being watched, recorded and data-analyzed more than ever before. In public, and in private, machines and the people who control them are watching what we do, listening to what we say, analyzing what we choose. Speed cameras on the relatively safe, serene streets of Barrington would be another layer of machines monitoring and altering human behavior.

The City of East Providence installed speed cameras around its school zones several years ago. In nearly all cases, those zones lie within heavily-traveled commuting routes, most of them four-lane roadways that are difficult for any pedestrian to cross at any time of day. That is not the case in Barrington, where school zones lie within quiet, middle-class residential neighborhoods, traversed by two-lane roadways with the occasional passing motorist.

Before swinging the speed camera sledgehammer, Barrington town leadership should ask two questions. First, is this really a problem, and if so, how big is the problem? Secondly, what else might be done before hard-wiring a new layer of government oversight into our lives?

Could flashing school-zone lights, as already exist around Primrose Hill School, be a healthy first step? Could the occasional police presence set a tone?

Speed cameras seem like the final solution for a problem that can’t be otherwise solved. That’s not where Barrington is now.