Driving This Berkshire County Road? Don't Dare Do This

When driving around Berkshire County, you'll find roads that have little idiosyncrasies that you'll have to get used to. In some towns, you may have to get used to driving on dirt roads. Depending on the time of the year, you have to plan ahead to give yourself extra time or plan on an alternate route due to construction work being performed. Then, of course, you're probably aware of which roads in the Berkshires are the speed traps and stay conscious of how fast you're moving along. I'll admit, working in Great Barrington for the past 16 years and driving from Pittsfield, I've had my fair share of warnings when driving on Pittsfield-Lenox Road in the overnight hours. It's certainly tempting to speed when the road is all yours.

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In addition to speeding, another road that you want to be careful on is East Street/Route 7 in Stockbridge. The reason for this has nothing to do with speeding. As you may or may not know, when you come to the end of that road to turn right on Main Street/Route 102 in the center of Stockbridge, immediately before taking that right there are not one but two stop signs. I'm much better at it now, but in the past, I was guilty of rolling through the first stop sign and then actually stopping at the second stop sign as they are only a few feet apart (see photo below).

With East Street being the location that is the home of Stockbridge's Fire Department it's necessary to have that first stop sign. It's a little tricky as the fire department is technically on East Street, but it's up and off to the side. If you don't pay attention, you may not even notice that it's there. If you don't take that first stop sign seriously and just roll right through it before you approach the second stop sign, there's a very likely chance that you could get pulled over. It happened to me a couple of times in the overnight hours and luckily, I was only issued a warning each of those times. Take it from me, treat the first stop sign like gold and make sure you come to a complete stop. You'll thank yourself for it, guaranteed.

Speaking of driving checkout these gas prizes from the past.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.