It's 3 a.m., do you know where your life is?

Tags:

DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

There are many things I’ve done these past decades that I’ve wished I hadn’t wasted part of my life doing. It could be as mundane as taking a nap on a beautiful day when I wasn’t really tired, dated the ice princess from high school or watched a Detroit Lions game on television. I’ll never get that time back and I try not to think of all the things I could have done instead. But few things gripe my behind more than sitting at a stoplight in the middle of Pinhook, Indiana, at 3 a.m. when the only living things around are me and the unseen inmates that escaped that aft
ernoon from the La Porte County Lockup.

What in the hell is the reason for having to sit there by myself when there won’t
be another car coming through for at least three or four hours? There’s a productive use of time and energy, isn’t it?

The same applies in populated areas. Where I live there’s a stoplight at the entrance to a high school. Fine…there should be. However, after 5
p.m. the only ones who would benefit from oncoming traffic having to stop are miscreants who had to stay after school…and they can wait! If they had behaved themselves they would have left school two hours before! There’s no reason that after a reasonable amount of hours after school has let out for the day that there couldn’t be a blinking yellow light for the busy road…and a blinking red light for cross-traffic. (Are you listening Al Gore?!)

Which leads to my next buttocks ache: traffic light synchronization. I honestly see the merit in not having lights 100% sync
hronized so that you’ll not be able to fly down a busy residential street like you’re flying a low-level mission on a B-1B. That would be dangerous because there will always be those that will view it as a qualifying lap for the Indianapolis 500. However…there are some streets where the red stoplights go on every damned block!

There’s no such thing as making it under the wire and missing a few of them. No mas, Raoul. For instance, there’s an exit off I-75N for Woodward Avenue, one of Detroit’s major streets (and the dividing line between the East side and the West side).

The exit is about seven or eight blocks from the Avenue. But…there are six or seven stop lights between the exit ramp and Woodward…and maybe one of them can be beaten. That leaves five or six lights that you are going to miss…and in all the years I’ve lived here and the hundreds of times I’ve exited at that spot I could count the number of vehicles that I’ve seen cross the intersection of each block on one hand…if I were Captain Hook! This is the urban equivalent of having to stop to pay tolls. All that time and fuel wasted and no way to get them back.

As usual I have a solution. From what I’ve read there’s plenty of stimulus money that hasn’t been spent. Instead of funding millions of dollars for a “Woodstock Museum” or hundreds of millions of dollars to determine if female gnats are subjected to PMS, take that money for a massive public works project that would install sensors at lightly-used intersections with stoplights that will work only when the occasional vehicle approaches it. The busier cross-traffic will have to stop but instead of waiting for The Invisible Man to go through on his own green light, drivers in the halted vehicles will at least see why they’ve had to stop in the first place.

After the sensor has determined no more vehicles are trying to go through the green light would change back to the street with the busy traffic and stay there until the above scenario repeats itself…which may not be for hours. Wiring hundreds of thousands of intersections with sensors across the entire country is about as technically challenging to civil engineers as opening a box of Milk Duds is for me.

Such a process will bring money and jobs and residual spending to every community involved and for once the taxpayers would actually see a benefit from all the spending their great, great, great, great grandchildren will owe the Treasury.

I have one more stop light suggestion. Instead of having a yellow light to warn of an impending light change – which generally causes tailgating for those trying to beat the light (and harken back to the days of the Roman Gladiators jockeying for position when the lions are let loose in the Coliseum) – why not hook up a digital countdown meter next to the light so that maybe some drivers will know to stop as it approaches zero instead of the current formula of “Red plus 3.” I’ve actually seen that exact system work on a recent trip to Los Angeles. A small flaw there however; some of the countdown lights hit 1 and the light goes to red which is the way it is supposed to work; but some of the lights get to 1 then 0 and there is a significant delay before the light turns red. This of course confuses and angers those Hollywood folks and rightly so.

Again, tap some of the stimulus money. We don’t need to spend the money to build Okefenokee International Airport in the middle of the Georgia swamps but we do need safer conditions at intersections.