An urban nightmare: it never turned green

 Posted by on 3 March 2009  Modern Life
Mar 032009
 
Photo from Flickr user "What Silence"

Photo from Flickr user "What Silence"

Every night, Richard Msur visits his elderly mother, and then drives home. Trying to make a turn, he’s faced with a sign that says right turns are only allowed on a green arrow. From the Mineapolis Star-Tribune:

At night, the arrow never turned green.

“I would wait and wait and wait, and the arrow wouldn’t change,” he said. The only time the arrow turns green at night is if a vehicle comes up 38th Street toward Excelsior. But because it’s a quiet neighborhood, that rarely happens.

“I thought it was a malfunction,” Masur said, and eventually he would run the light. But he could never understand why the city set up such a dysfunctional signal.

Turns out the city of St. Louis Park wanted the light just the way it was.

Paging Dr. Kafka! (via Obscure Store)

Grant Hamilton

  • Colin Corneau

    Kinda like how Brandon lights, traffic and roads are constructed to have you come to a complete stop at LEAST every 2 blocks…and yet our police insist we have a ‘speeding problem’.

    We’re through the looking glass, people….

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      Colin: I have done *extensive* research on synchronization of traffic lights, and it’s by and large impossible in Brandon. We just don’t have enough people all traveling in the same direction. I mean, you can synchronize them east->west or west->east, but then you totally fuck up the people heading the opposite direction. And that doesn’t take into account the people heading north->south or south->north on streets that have to cross your “synchronized” streets. Plus, what about people who turn? What about pedestrians who push the button for a longer green so they can cross, screwing up the whole system?

      Synchronized traffic lights are an incredibly difficult mathematical problem, and they tend to only be implemented along fairly busy streets that have, say, a morning commuter rush, and then an afternoon rush in the opposite direction. Brandon just doesn’t have that kind of traffic flow.

  • Pat J

    @Colin: And even so you can get from any point A to any point B in under 20 minutes.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Amy Breen

    The least they can do is turn some of the lights to flashing amber at night. And get rid of turning signals at say ,18th and Richmond, late at night. The one car wanting to turn can wait until I, the only car wanting to go straight, goes through the intersection.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    Yes, I agree with that — flashing amber after midnight, say. That might teach some people what a flashing stoplight means, too.

    There are too many people who think that flashing amber means stop, or yield. It actually means that the other side of the intersection has a flashing red — which means, “treat this like a stop sign” — and you can proceed straight through on a flashing amber, but be cautious, because other cars may enter the intersection.

  • Colin Corneau

    It doesn’t help that most (not all!) Brandon drivers are, to put it diplomatically, REALLY FRAKKIN SLOW…every day’s a parade to people here, for some reason.