Home > People Can Be Idiots > What’s With the Lights?

What’s With the Lights?

June 2nd, 2006

I try not to post too often about personal peeves in my daily life, but the city where I live has gone out of its way to make life difficult for commuters. It seems like there can be no such thing as a convenient solution for these boneheads. For the past many, many years, probably before I moved here six years ago, the city has been working on a central thoroughfare down the middle of town. Before now, it was only half completed, and so you had to take one of two alternate routes through town.

In order to get from where I live over to the other end of the city (where the only bridge over the river is), you’d either have to take a narrow, one-lane road congested with traffic, or you’d have to go way out around the edge of town on the small riverside road. The narrow road is more direct, but the river road has fewer lights and much less traffic. Neither was really a good solution, and one would lose quite some time either way.

But finally, after all those years, they finally finished the big road right smack through the middle of town. They must have spent a fortune on it, too–buying up all that land couldn’t have been cheap, not to mention paying for years of construction (nothing ever seems to get done around here quickly). So now, there’s a nice, big, wide, new boulevard. When I saw it had opened, I figured that getting through town would be a snap. What an outrageous fool I was.

The city planners, of course, just had to find some way to completely screw it up. Their solution: stack the traffic lights.

Let me give you a picture of what it’s like right now. First, to get on the new road from my side of town, you can take one of two quick routes from a common intersection. I’ve tried both several times. In both cases, you leave from the common intersection when the light turns green, and hit another traffic light before you get to the traffic light at the intersection at the beginning of the big road.

If you take the first option of the two, you immediately hit a red light. You wait, and then once it turns green, you meet the another light just turning red.

Seeing how that sucked, I tried the other way. Leaving the common intersection, you get an immediate green light at the next intersection–but then two red lights in a row, again, each turning red just as you arrive. Same thing as the other route.

Both leave you at the entrance to the main road. When that light turns green, you move forward about 50 feet–to be immediately stopped at a light just turning red as you get to it. And here, you see the inevitable frustration ahead of you: as you approach, you can see the next two intersections beyond the light that just turned red on you. The next one has just turned green, and the one after just turned red. That’s right–three lights in a row, closely spaced, turning alternately.

In other words, within just a quarter of a mile, no fewer than five traffic lights timed to catch all traffic, both ways, for the maximum possible duration, each light turning red just as traffic reaches it. Frustrating as damned hell. I mean, I didn’t even think it was possible to do that, but they found a way. And three of those five intersections have no cross traffic. That’s right, no cars coming the other direction. You’re stopping for no reason whatsoever.

And, not a little symbolically, as you wait at the middle light, you are right smack in front of city hall, where you can vividly imagine the traffic planners laughing their asses off at the hapless schmoes (that’s you, bub) getting stopped every fifty or sixty feet.

I timed it, by the way: the old ways through town were quicker by a minute or so–when this new way should have easily saved three or four minutes of transit time.

I’m used to seeing this kind of stuff, unfortunately. I mean, if it’s geared to make traffic going one way faster, I’m perfectly fine with it. But all too often, you come upon a stretch that stops traffic both ways–or even worse, it makes it so that drivers can get through the lights only if they speed like madmen, which they all too often do. (I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the cops don’t patrol these areas.)

But this new way “through” town takes the cake, easily winning the award for the dumbest-ever traffic planning solution. What a damn fool waste of time, energy, opportunity, and money.

OK, peeve rant over.

Categories: People Can Be Idiots Tags: by
  1. Paul
    June 3rd, 2006 at 05:21 | #1

    At the risk of sounding naive… can you contact someone in the municipality and complain, or ask them about it? Is that even something that is done in Japan?

    There’s a traffic light at the end of my street, where the street tees into a main thouroughfare, that has a 7-second green light. No lie- there’s about enough time for two or three cars to get through, and then it goes back to red.

    But the city of Seattle has a phone line for that, and the gal there has promised that they’ll get out there and get it fixed somehow.

    Now, this has thus far proven to be a lie; I’ve called twice over a couple of months, with no help shown, but at least they make a show of giving it a shot.

    Or maybe the synchronization of the lights is something that they haven’t gotten to in the project yet?

    Paul
    Seattle, WA

  2. Luis
    June 3rd, 2006 at 13:36 | #2

    Good question. But somehow I think they would not be too responsive, probably giving me the “it’s not my department” runaround. After all, they come to work via the street in back, and are not affected by the lights. And you have to figure that someone did this for a reason (hard to imagine it’s an accident they’re timed that way), thinking it’s all in the name of traffic safety or something. Maybe I’ll give it a try, though.

    About the seven-second light–yeah, I know of a few that are kind of like that. There’s one at a major park, Kasai Rinkai, where I go birdwatching. The entrance is a major intersection; a north-south boulevard that terminates at the park, and an east-west thoroughfare where the two directions are divided by a wide space. For drivers going east, they must turn against ongoing traffic to enter the park. Because the east-west lanes are divided by about a 30-foot break, when the eastbound drivers make the turn to cross the westbound lane, they get stopped by the traffic light going south into the park. Only about seven or eight cars can fill up that area, which is already filled by southbound traffic before the eastbound drivers can get to it. What’s worse, the turn-only signal is only 15 seconds long, and the southbound green light is 90 seconds. So while about 70 or 80 southbound cars get through their light, only about 4 or 5 eastbound drivers get into the park. The eastbound turn lane gets backed up more than a kilometer sometimes. Makes me glad I’m a scooter and can get around most of it. For some hapless drivers who don’t catch on, they wait more than an hour to get into the park. The drivers that do catch on get out of the turn lane, drive on to the next intersection, make a U-turn, and then come from the west where it’s an easy turn into the park.

    Got that down? Sorry about that. But if you can visualize it, you can see how stupid it is… and it’s all too common a situation over here.

  3. ykw
    June 3rd, 2006 at 16:30 | #3

    I live in Boston, MA, Usa where they recently completed this thing called the big dig, which is a $20b construction project that involves rebuilding the highways through boston. Before the big dig, the highways were bumper to bumper traffic. Now, after $20b, they are still bumper to bumper. The bottleneck is 6 lanes in the north-south higway through Boston, which did not change. I would think for $20b they could have added some more lanes, yet they did not. Perhaps they could not get authority from some from the neighborhoods. The transportation dept for many years talked about how this would solve all our traffic problems.

Comments are closed.