Denying Reality: When Politics Trumps Engineering
By John Carr, NMA Massachusetts Activist
I used to watch my city’s Traffic Council meetings every month. It was amusing to see the difference between rumor and reality.
Once a resident said her street was packed with parked cars every day and nobody could get out of the driveway. Field observation by city DPW showed one car parked on the entire block. There was supposedly car after car racing down a street before dawn every day. A traffic counter showed one car during the entire hour before dawn, and it was doing the speed limit. Constant rumbling of heavy trucks meant one truck per hour. And so on.
One lesson is to always measure.
The other lesson is to use your measurements. If you ask a question and ignore the answer, you aren’t asking a question. You are begging for confirmation.
There’s a typical dispute going on now in my part of the city. Some residents don’t appreciate outsiders driving on their streets. It’s the usual complaint heard in thousands of places around America. Cut-through commuters are speeding past kids and I can’t back out of my driveway — can’t you do something before something.
The real problem is that there is an intersection a half mile away that is over capacity and the city won’t fix it. If you’re heading west you can skip the half mile traffic jam by making a right turn to get to the next street over.
The Traffic Council recognized these complaints as typical. Field observation showed the supposedly heavy, fast commuter traffic was 30-40 cars per hour going the speed limit during morning peak.
Traffic obstruction petition denied.
Aldermen, who never met a nuisance traffic sign they didn’t like, persuaded another committee to overrule the Traffic Council and run a trial. The trial was a temporary “no right turn 7AM-9AM” sign (pictured above) designed to prevent outsiders from entering the streets in question. After 60 days the committee would see whether the sign worked.
The results of the trial were presented last Wednesday.
Cut-through traffic increased when the sign prohibiting it was posted. The trial was worse than a failure.
Committee members spent a half hour trying to explain why this failure was really a success and the sign needed to be made permanent.
To politicians, one of the axioms of traffic regulation says that more rules are good. When the evidence conflicts with this belief, the evidence must be changed. The committee postponed the vote for 30 days to give the chair time to make the traffic counts come out the right way. They’ll do something like counting how many cars turn when a police officer is watching.
The traffic studies don’t matter. What matters is, some residents like their placebo and it’s worth ticketing other residents to keep their favor.
You might wonder why politicians favor one group of residents over another. One street is mostly apartments and two family homes. The other is mostly single family homes. You can guess which is which.
This is the difference between engineering and politics.
There’s probably a similar story from your city.
In my area there are tons of speed bumps. And recently one road had it's speed limit changed because one house on the road complained that the speed was too fast. most of the road is woods, not houses. They lowered it from 40 to 30 and a small section 25. It was def politics. People still drive the old speed anyway. Not to mention there are many do not enter signs and blockages of roads to prevent people from using back residential roads and keep people on the main roads. Which when one of the main roads has a serious traffic incident, the traffic becomes horrible as there is often only 1 or at most 2 ways to get somewhere in alot of the areas. Ridiculous, not for safety, all for traffic control.
40 cars per hours is a car every 90 seconds. Plenty of time to back onto the street.
I agree that if they are evenly spaced exactly 90 seconds apart. It could mean one every 10 seconds over a 7 minute period. As you say that may not be that many cars but it is a far thing from something to blow off on a normally very little used street that was not designed for through traffic. I do not think anyone can laugh it off without seeing it or living there.
But then no (or -2) cars for the next 53 minutes. If the theoretical possibility of having a 7 minute delay in your commute to work bothers you that much there's not much to do except sleep under your desk at work.
Also, how come we can't say that 40cars/minute would be huge without seeing your neighborhood, but you can say 40cars/minute would be huge without ever experiencing it?
Thanks james. I will get a mattress for my desk at work or maybe i can drive 20 mph over the limit to make up the time and have a traffic cop in front of my house making sure it is safe to back onto the street. or maybe I could go to the city and see if they can move the traffic to a roadway designed for through traffic and not on a roadway where kids walk to the bus stop on because there are no sidewalks .
i would recommend that everyone would watch the tv show IRT Deadliest Roads on the History Channel. It shows driving in India. It shows that the drivers that are from other parts of the US and Canada are there and comment on the worst driving they have ever seen. India has many very agressive drivers. I talked to a coworker from there and he said that the show is telling the truth and how deadly their driving is. He also explained how safe their interstate roads are. On those roads there is very strict enforcment of laws. He said that those roads are as safer or safer than any highway in the US. It goes to show that if you want to drive where anything goes then your death chances sky rocket. He said death is not that big a deal there. There are so many people that 100s of thousands dead in traffic accodents means little. They have a traffic death every 3 or 4 seconds. I guess that is what many want to have in the US.
yeah i've watched that show, they are crazy down there. The Bus Drivers are the worst. They have no traffic rules at all. Pass where ever they want.
I do not understand your stament? Above in your other statement you said there should be no rules, Go and do some research. I have found that in India they have almost no police enforcement throughout the country except for the interstate roads and there they have decided to have strict enforcement of laws because that is where people from other countries drive and they do not want to make their country look bad and dangerous.
John. It's that way because that's the way people are. People with power deny reality all the time. I read an article about the "Innocents project". Two hundred and fifty eight people proven innocent by DNA. Many more innocent people in jail.
When the DNA evidence confirms what the prosecutor wants, it's good. When it doesn't, something is wrong with it.
At the traffic court level many, many innocent people are victemized by ego's and power trips. Inadequate human failures who didn't get laid the night before need a whipping boy. Only makes the rich richer. The insurance companies love it.
It's time for change….big, major change. The French revolution wasn't such a bad idea.
I guess you have a lot of experience in traffic court. From what I have heard , more than 95 percent of the people that go to traffic court are guilty and either are hoping the policeman does not show up or are hoping for a downgrade in consequences. The 95 percent may be closer to 99%. With those kind of fiigures a French revolution seems to be a bit extreme. That is just my view and I am sure I have far less traffic court experience than you.