Archive for March 5th, 2009

An excellent BBC dispatch from Iraq notes the return of traffic police to the capital. I liked these lines, which describe the capital after the US-led invasion:

Traffic signals and direction signs became museum pieces, fragments of a dead language.

Baghdad has no parking restrictions. You could just pull up your car wherever you like. Something the car bombers used to good effect - you could drive right up to your target and no-one would stop you.

Photo by Tamika Moore

Speaking of traffic lights, apparently there’s a movement afoot to paint them black.

Reports The Birmingham News:

“Several states along the West Coast’s Sunbelt: California, Arizona and Nevada, use traffic signals encased in black housing to reduce glare, especially at sunrise or sunset. The black paint absorbs the sunlight instead of reflecting it back into the eyes of the driver.”

And a refreshingly frank assessment from the city’s engineer:

Birmingham Traffic Engineer Greg Dawkins said the black signal heads look better. “I found no compelling reason to keep the yellow, except that is the way it has always been done,” he said.

Reader Timothy writes in about the intersection of W. Broadway and Grand in Manhattan, “a notoriously noisy and difficult intersection.”

“This morning I watched for an hour while cars, trucks and pedestrians shared this space quietly…with civility!! little honking; no aggressive driving; no traffic cop.

Instead of a line of cars waiting for the light to change, alternate sides vying w/ each other for the few precious moments allowing them the right to pass thru….no one had to wait very long. And in fact the alternate sides traded back and forth, almost at a one-to-one ratio. No one had to wait, so no one got stuck in a line, so no one sped up, so no one honked, so there was no need for aggressive driving! even pedestrians got their due.

This is interesting (and hard to believe no one honked!), and I’ve heard things like before — newspaper accounts of how people felt, in blackouts and such, the traffic actually worked better. Or of how traffic police do a better job than lights (though the classic problem with police is coordinating intersections). Of course, it’s hard to really gauge things like flow from one’s own car, although sensing cooperative behavior is certainly possible. Whether it would last over a week or a month, instead of in a temporary situation, is another question. Still, one also hears, in those same blackouts, about the number of traffic accidents, and how they must be attributable to the blackout. Though this doesn’t explain the accidents on those days when the lights are functioning; but again, real data, as far as I can tell, is thin on the ground here.