traffic

Today there was a major power outage in a section of Huntsville that affected my building at work. I decided to take the time to go grab a late lunch that I thought I had missed altogether.

I came to the intersection of Bradford and Wynn, a 4-way 2 lane each way (not including double turn lanes) intersection that is usually fairly busy. The lights were also out due to the power outage and did you know what I found? Without any police assistance, the intersection was flowing smoothly and safely. Vehicles from each direction were flowing just fine, cars in the turn lanes were getting through, and people altogether were forced to take a cautious approach to the intersection that IMO ended up being safer and maybe even more efficient than had the lights been turned on.

There have also been studies showing that the more we try and control traffic, the more people let their guard down and the end result is an intersection that is less safe and less efficient than if we had left it alone to begin with. This is part of the concept of why roundabouts work so well. (we have one roundabout in Huntsville that I know of in the Providence area). In a roundabout, people are forced into a safe approach to the intersection rather than placing all of their confidence in a lighting device that really doesn't reflect reality. How many people die each year from getting hit by a red light runner?

Suddenly, what was once thought to be a standard that forces safety and traffic flow, now you start to realize the opposite effect could result.

Add this and the fact that traditional lighting devices other than LED traffic lights cost approximately a few thousand dollars per month in energy costs via tax dollars per intersection and you start to wonder if we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot.

I wonder what else we take for granted to be the "correct" way of doing things when there is probably a better way.

Well, thanks to rapture, we have been getting a lot of love over the past 24hours. I bet he didn't know what he was going to unleash when he took his camera phone and snapped this innocent photo of the ordering panel at one of the local BKs. Well, the Diggers picked it up and ran with it. We made the front page! I know a few of us are quite excited because we're frequent diggers as well. Well, people seem to like slightly blurry photos of Burger King because we got some action from Kotaku, ArsTechnica, the Wired Blog and Destructoid plastered us to their front page as well. Wow. All there is to say is wow.

The site went down Friday afternoon and rapture and I spent most of