I have an inlaw who engineered traffic lights for about 20 years. I had lots of arguments with him during that time, so I know what traffic engineering is likely to answer to the charge of stupid traffic lights.
If you want it in a nutshell, it is that we Americans do not want rational government. We fear it. We think it will turn us into automatons. So we invent as many of them as possible and set them at each other like a dogfight. Then, forgetting what we�ve done, we ask them to produce rational results and they fail.
And a prime example is in traffic lighting. When you find a light you don�t like, you can�t just pick up the phone and tell a light man somewhere to change it. No, you FIRST have to find out who is doing the engineering for that particular light. Because there is a different phone number for a particular light. Anytime I�d call my inlaw, he�d ask for the location and then give me the phone number for that light. It depended upon whether the road was city, county, state or federal. Trouble is we mix all these different roads in one system. And light timing is done for roads that cross each other, so there may be four different traffic flows being engineered. And two may be city and the other two county or state. I don�t know to what degree they even try to coordinate, but even if they do, there are engineering philosophies involved that may not mesh totally.
With all the different factors involved, you don�t maximize, you optimize. But to what level DO you optimize, given you have different systems woven together?
And beyond that, you have political concerns that override the optimization scheme. Some neighborhoods would like to see traffic SLOWER, not faster.
I won�t belabor this, but you can see what a tangled web we�ve woven. A driver may only sense frustration in his IMMEDIATE priority of going somewhere faster. He may not even KNOW that there is a whole history of choices being represented in how many seconds a light stays on green.
Maybe that�s why Churchill called democracy the worst way to organize a government, except for all the rest. The truth is we micromanage our government, thinking it is our right to do so. And the people in government let us do it, fearing the firestorm of criticism if any momentary citizen urge is opposed. To quote ANOTHER famous philosopher, Walt Kelly, �We have met the enemy and he is us.�
As for an experience an individual reports driving, unless is it is random and representative, it may not be accurate. That is, unless it involves only city streets, no county or state highways, it probably doesn�t really reflect what a given city does with traffic lights.
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Jim Mork
Cooper Neighborhood
Longfellow Community
Minneapolis, a great city getting greater (much to the disgruntlement of a few)
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