America’s traffic engineers need to wake up
The otherday, as my car juddered over constellations of potholes, past tenuouslymaintained schools and bus stops done up in graffiti, I got to wondering. TheCalifornia county where I live has some of the highest taxes in the nation. Oursales tax is 8.75 percent. It costs $4 to cross the San Francisco-Oakland BayBridge. Yearly property taxes can easily reach five figures — and no, I’m notincluding pennies.
Yet inreturn for the torrent of tax money our government takes in, Californians haveroads rated among the very worst in America, libraries that close for part ofthe week due to lack of funding, and a public school system that one respectedresearch group has ranked 47th of the 50 states.
Where, Iwondered, is all this tax money going? As I dived to a stop at yet anotherill-timed red light with no cross traffic in sight for miles, the answer cameto me from above.
Trafficsignals.
Apparentlythere’s never a shortage of funds to pay for huge, complex and frequentlysuperfluous arrays of traffic signals. They sprout like gigantic weeds alongroadways large and small, occasionally actually making an intersection safer,but more often just obstructing traffic by reflexively “regulating”some half-abandoned side street that would be just as well off — possiblybetter off — with a plain old stop sign.
Clearly,an intersection unfettered by signals is a terrifying prospect to trafficengineers, and not just in California. So, after erecting jungles of signalpoles on every street corner of every jerkwater town in America, the trafficengineers moved on to the suburbs with glee, slavering at all those miles ofroads waiting to be put in harness.
Today it’sa rare suburban boulevard that hasn’t got a huge tangle of signals arching overit every few hundred feet, with redundent stacks of lamps addressing each andevery lane and then some. Either we motorists are so dense that it takes fivered lights to tell us what one used to, or else traffic engineers just can’tget enough of all that neat hardware.
Despitetheir numbing ubiquity, though, far too many traffic signals remain utterlybrainless, mindlessly regulating traffic flow by time instead of by context. Inthis age of computing miracles, vast numbers of signals aren’t even smartenough to know that nobody’s coming.
We’ve allbeen in thrall to red and green lights for so long that we’ve come to accepttheir hurky-jerky senselessness as a normal part of driving.
Yetthere’s no immutable law that demands traffic signals on every street corner inAmerica, much less signals that can’t think straight. It’s happened in partbecause many cities and towns have come to regard elaborate signal installationsas a sort of badge of urbanity, rather than as a useful tool that can besenselessly overemployed.
And itsurely hasn’t hurt that they offer traffic engineers virtually infinite jobsecurity.
Given thiskind of bureaucratic inertia, it seems inevitable that every pair ofintersecting ruts in America will eventually be fitted with a full complementof traffic and pedestrian signals. Then we can all be stopped at a red lightsomewhere in East Podunk with our engines idling, while nobody’s coming theother way.
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Copyright 2007 Arrol Gellner
