Broad meadows

Recently I was on my way to picking up an employee leaving MacDonalds in the early morning hours and as I was approaching their parking lot, I began to get into the turn lane. Just in the nick of time, I noticed that a curbed intrusion had been placed in that turn lane just before the restaurant entrance. I was able to brake and then go around it and then back into the turn lane to enter the parking lot. This was one of many that had been placed in the turn lane on MLK Boulevard in Lansing, Michigan.

They appear to be pedestrian crossings , but I’m not sure how placing a curb in the middle of a turn lane in any way helps them cross the street. All it does is put an impediment in the road that can wreck my car, which it nearly did. A recent customer related to me that someone near his house had hit one of them. If a pedestrian is crossing a street and they get hit, it can only happen one of two ways: either accidentally or on purpose, in either case the curb in the middle of the road wouldn’t help them, it would only wreck the car. So why put them there?

I’ve been writing a lot about traffic law and its effort to find ways to punish those who don’t do damage using the damage done by others as an excuse to do so. It’s not justice, it’s a perversion of justice. It is governance for its own sake, only. The problem I see is that not only do the things they do pervert justice, but it also is contrary to safe passage. Traffic signals are another example of this.

All of us who drive today have had traffic signals that we are compelled to obey and we have become very used to them. But driving in the wee hours of the morning showed me something about them that I never really thought about before. When I’m driving at that time there is virtually no one in sight. The spaces between the cars are a minimum of about a quarter of a mile and larger. The only time I really come close to anyone that time of morning is when stopped at a red light. Then suddenly all of the spaces we had between us is gone. All of the margin of error that we had put between us is now gone and others are arriving. And what makes it all that much worse is that there is usually no one coming from the other way.

Learning to drive in the Detroit area in the mid 1970’s, our driving instructor told that we didn’t really need to speed on surface streets because all of the lights were timed for the speed limit. So you might turn onto a major street and get caught at the first light, but if you went the speed limit from there, the lights in that direction would be turning green as you approached them. There were no turn phase lights then, either, and they weren’t needed. Everyone knew how to get through them and there were few backups because of it. None of the traffic signals were closer than a mile apart, roughly.

The Michigan left was introduced around that time for divided roads so that people wouldn’t have to make their left turn at a light. Now there are lights at Michigan lefts. Since it’s a one way, you can turn left on red. So how does a light do anything more than a stop sign? It’s ridiculous. You might as well have poured gasoline on a quarter of a million dollars and set it on fire for all the good one of these does.

Anything that compresses traffic should be seen as bad thing. Anything that takes away the margin of error that I have built into my drive reduces my safety. But what makes lighted intersections even more dangerous is that every time it changes, someone is having to make a decision to speed up, slow down or perhaps stomp on the brakes. Any one of those decisions can lead to an accident and it’s not based on anything having to do with the conditions of the intersection. Almost all of the accidents I have seen or where there was a close call have happened at lighted intersections. Some people are so afraid of these intersections that they will brake at a green light just so they don’t have to make that decision. Others, knowing that they will have to sit through multiple phases, will push the light and cause a dangerous situation. Personally, I feel all anyone needs to know when approaching such intersections is who yields to who. Why? Because when it’s clear, it doesn’t become clearer by waiting longer, it can only become less clear.

Some will think, “well, that may work when traffic is light, but not when it’s heavy.” What I would say is that if the lights make light traffic heavier, what does it do when it is heavier? It makes it heavier still. Take the highway for example. While it doesn’t have intersections, it does have entrance ramps and when you’re in cities, you have more of them. Of the cities that I have driven in, the worst congestion always seems to be in cities where the speed limit was 70 coming into the city, but drops to 55 in the city. This is another traffic compressing practice. The people in front have to slow, while the people behind are catching up and narrowing the distance between them, making it harder for people entering the freeway and the congestion worsens. Always.

Along I96 near the Wixom/Novi area, they have put lights at the end of the entrance ramps onto i96 east, a recipe for disaster. You have merge onto freeways close to the speed of oncoming traffic to enter safely. And again, if it’s clear, why should you have to stop? Getting up to speed is impossible there and you can bet someone will lose their life because of it. Incredibly stupid. Basically, they ignore all the previous knowledge that we had about traffic safety and are putting laws and infrastructure in place that put us in danger of injury or worse. It can’t just be stupidity, but also malevolence. If you can’t be trusted to handle smaller safety issues, why then should they be trusted with larger ones? And our collective experience these last few years shows that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing.