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My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1

My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels. But now someone's desire to have slow traffic is satisfied and they are no longer pestering the local government who is no longer pestering the highway department. That's mission accomplished as far as they care. Making the local transportation infrastructure not suck is not a metric they are evaluated by so all the second order effects are irrelevant. If you're lucky the marker will have a snow plow accident in a couple months and it will never get replaced because everyone will realize it actually made things worse. Also, it's worth noting that despite the slowed traffic the situation is probably more hazardous for pedestrians because the traffic now takes more of their time and attention.
- wcunning 7y ago
  Nope, they get unbolted when we start having frosts and put back in the spring. They also replace them periodically when they get ripped off by the large trucks and greyhound buses that don't fit between them perfectly... I really wish I could correlate traffic slowdown in a publishable way to provide for wrongful death suits of the ambulance occupants' families against the city, but I haven't figured out how to quantify it cheaply and publicly yet.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

>My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels. But now someone's desire to have slow traffic is satisfied and they are no longer pestering the local government who is no longer pestering the highway department. That's mission accomplished as far as they care. Making the local transportation infrastructure not suck is not a metric they are evaluated by so all the second order effects are irrelevant. If you're lucky the marker will have a snow plow accident in a couple months and it will never get replaced because everyone will realize it actually made things worse. Also, it's worth noting that despite the slowed traffic the situation is probably more hazardous for pedestrians because the traffic now takes more of their time and attention.

wcunning 7y ago
Nope, they get unbolted when we start having frosts and put back in the spring. They also replace them periodically when they get ripped off by the large trucks and greyhound buses that don't fit between them perfectly... I really wish I could correlate traffic slowdown in a publishable way to provide for wrongful death suits of the ambulance occupants' families against the city, but I haven't figured out how to quantify it cheaply and publicly yet.