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.