Monday, February 25, 2013

MONEY FOR NOTHING


The other day, as my car juddered over constellations of potholes, past tenuously-maintained schools and bus stops done up in graffiti, I got to wondering. The Califonia county where I live has some of the highest taxes in the nation. The sales tax is 9.75 percent. It costs four dollars to cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge. Yearly property taxes can easily reach five figures--and no, I’m not including the cents column.

Yet in return for the oceans of money our state government takes in, Californians have roads rated among the very worst in America, libraries that close for part of the week due to lack of funding, and a public school system that one respected research group has ranked 47th among the fifty states.  

Where, I wondered, was all this tax money going?  As my car dived to a stop at yet another ill-timed red light with no cross traffic in sight for miles, the answer came to me from above.  

Traffic signals. 

Apparently there’s never a shortage of funds to pay for huge, complex, and usually unnecessary arrays of traffic signals. They sprout like weeds along roadways large and small, now and then actually making an intersection safer, but more often just obstructing traffic by reflexively “regulating” some half-abandoned side street that would be just as well off--possibly better off--with a plain old stop sign.  

Apparently, an intersection unfettered by signals is a terrifying prospect to traffic engineers, and not just in California. So, after erecting jungles of signal poles on every streetcorner of every jerkwater town in America, they’ve gleefully moved on to the suburbs, slavering at all those miles of roadway waiting to be put in harness.  

Today it’s a rare suburban boulevard that hasn’t got a huge tangle of signals arching over it every few hundred feet, with redundent stacks of lamps individually addressing each and every lane and then some. Either we motorists are so dense that it takes five red lights to tell us what one used to, or else traffic engineers just can’t get enough of all that neat hardware.   

Yet despite their numbing ubiquity, far too many traffic signals remain utterly brainless, mindlessly regulating traffic flow by time instead of by context.  In this age of computing miracles, vast numbers of signals aren’t even smart enough to know that nobody’s coming.

We’ve all been in thrall to this third-rate technology for so long that we’ve come to accept its hurky-jerky senselessness as a normal part of driving.  Yet there’s no immutable law that demands traffic signals on every streetcorner in America, much less signals that can’t think straight. It’s happened in large part because many cities and towns have come to regard elaborate signal installations as a sort of badge of urbanity, rather than as a useful tool that can be senselessly overemployed.  And it surely hasn’t hurt that the civic addiction to signals offers traffic engineers virtually infinite job security.

Given this kind of bureaucratic inertia, it seems inevitable that every pair of intersecting ruts in America will eventurally be fitted with a full complement of traffic and pedestrian signals. Then, at last, you can be idling at a red light in some Iowa cornfield, while nobody’s coming the other way. 


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