The Wages of Traffic Calming
It's been a week since the second storm, and 11 days since the first - but because the brilliant thinkers in Howard County traffic control think that the "random shapes in the road" approach to slowing traffic is a good idea, we have this to put up with:
Many of us in the neighborhood have been wondering how plows would deal with those areas after a major snow storm for years; this year, we discovered that the answer is mostly "they don't". That was pretty clear to everyone but the advanced thinkers in the local government. I rather suspect that none of the traffic design folks have atrocities like this near them...
The Insanity of Traffic Calming
One of my pet peeves in the neighborhood I live in is traffic calming - which, as practiced in this part of Maryland, seems to equate to "drop random shapes we made with playdo into the street and see what happens". Consider these, on one of the two routes out of our neighborhood:
With that first one, see how the car parked in the street (and that happens a lot there) effectively blocks access in one direction? With the second, see how one end of the device has been chipped off? That was a snow plow 4 years ago. Every day, school buses have the devil's own time navigating these, and I have no idea what a Fire Truck would do.
In the hall of bad ideas, these are really bad. I have a hot tip for the rocket scientists who come up with this stupidity: Just Narrow the Whole Road! It'll slow down traffic, and cause fewer ancillary problems.
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