-Robert, frustrated D.C. tourist

You've convinced me, Robert: Flying in is the way to go...

Isn't it amazing that we (as a people) have so many highly paid "public
servants" who do NOTHING but design road systems -- and yet can get it so
wrong?

Iowa City is full of this kind of stupidity. We've got Muscatine St.,
Muscatine Avenue, Lower Muscatine Dr -- what, like, no one could think of a
unique name for these streets? When we first moved here, we were on the
wrong Muscatine every day.

And this isn't an isolated incident, and it's certainly not unique to Iowa
City. Every city I've lived in has similar examples.

What I like is when the road planners decided to install "traffic calming
devices" (AKA: Chicanes) on a road -- without telling the residents in
advance! Overnight, they started installing these crazy things that
required traffic to literally zig-zag down their street.

Needless to say, the residents were furious, and went straight to City Hall.
Within a month, the work crews were out, bulldozing the new chicanes -- at
incredible expense.

Even funnier is our latest-and-greatest computer-controlled stoplights, now
with little cameras on each pole. Because of this wonderful system, it is
now possible to get EVERY SINGLE RED LIGHT as you drive across town! What
a wonderful innovation!

When traffic is relatively light, they do an okay job of keeping things
moving -- but as soon as things pick up, bang -- you WILL get every red
light, as it is working just a smidge out of sync with the actual traffic
flow.

You'd think they'd get this right, by now. I lived in Racine, WI when they
received a grant for the very first non-experimental, computer-controlled
stop lights in the nation, way back in the early 1970s. These were the
first "loop-in-the-ground" sensors, all connected to a central computer down
at City Hall. I actually wrote an article about this system for my high
school newspaper, and it was a marvel of technology (the computer looked
like something out of Lost in Space) for the time.

And -- it worked. Because all the lights were interconnected, there was an
"over-ride" mode that would enable the system to sense big slugs of traffic
at rush hour. They would then stop individually sensing (and changing) and
become more "sequenced" -- just like the old mechanical stop lights tried to
do.

I don't know why they got away from that -- I suppose cost.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"