To semaphore or not to semaphore?
     The worst damage to our beleaguered transportation system is of our own doing. The air pollution, choking exhaust, grid lock's, standstills and crawling parking lots are the result of a major mistake in history. We took a wrong turn and we are now headed down a dead end street. Time travel is possible. We traveled through the 1800's till now on the wrong time line. We changed our own time line and set ourselves back 70 years or more. We need to change our course and go another direction soon. If we don't turn onto another road we face metropolitan cardiac arrest. What is metropolitan cardiac arrest? Seattle is a prime example of a city with heart disease and we are setting ourselves up for a heart attack. When a huge company like Boeing with it's tremendous infrastructure, threatens to pull out of the Seattle area if something is not done about the paralyzing grid lock. (editors note: Since this article was published Boing has pulled it's corporate offices out of Seattle and there are signs that the rest of the infrastructure will be leaving too.) You have to admit there is a monumental problem facing Seattle. Not only Seattle but many cities world wide, like Boston, are now facing metro cardiovascular disease. While Boeing may feel that jumping ship and running away will solve their circulation problems it won't cure the illness for them. They will only take it with them to where ever they may go and infect other cities. You see metro heart disease is contagious and can be spread by companies and large influxes of peoples. So Boing is part of the problem. If they move they take the traffic with them and the many affiliated companies that will follow and all the fast food chains and the grocery stores and the malls and everything else that follows the billion dollar plus paychecks and some other poor community will see it's roadways begin to clog like the arteries of a heart diseased patient. Even if Seattle didn't have the mega companies like Microsoft and Boeing there would still be a traffic grid lock on its freeways. The Seattle commerce is more than just Boeing and Microsoft. It is every single person living in the area and even people who never see this part of the world but do business here. If we are going to point fingers we need only to point at ourselves and a big mistake in history. We have narrowed our cities blood veins with so called "urban renewal" and created clots in the form of stop lights and signs. We have impeded our traffic so severely that it barely crawls. This hurts us. Our commerce is slowed and costs more to sustain. Our oil reserves are fast running out threatening a major world wide disaster of monumental proportions and yet we complacently sit at a stop light burning precious fuel and not moving. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of cars stopped but still running and you begin to see the magnitude of the problem. The millions of gallons of wasted fuel that is subsequently turned into poisonous pollution.

An explosive beginning!
     In 1868 a pair of red and green gas lamps were installed outside Britain's house of Parliament. The lamps could be alternated to keep horse drawn carriages from colliding. The lamps proved to be as deadly as the collisions they were meant to prevent when they exploded and killed a passing policeman. How different history may have been if this had been the end of the traffic light. But as luck would have it the idea was revived in Europe and the US. Wolverhampton, England had an automatic traffic light constructed in 1926 and it operated until 1968. As you might have guessed by now my finger is pointing at the traffic light not to mention the stop signs that out number traffic lights hundreds to one.

A different time line.

Picture in your minds what our cities would be like if the traffic light and the stop sign had not developed into our chief means of traffic control. Would it be a picture of chaos and dozens of smashed cars at every intersection? Of course not. We would have created other means to control the flow of traffic. I like to picture a modern city like Seattle with streets and roadways unimpaired by stop signs and red lights. Cities with free flowing traffic that breezes right through downtown never having to stop for a light or stop sign. Freeways that are only moderately busy because people can drive unimpaired on any of the city streets. Cities with hundreds of over/underpasses that keep the traffic cruising along. But don't picture the big ugly, bulky and cumbersome over/underpasses of today. I like to think that we would have developed over/under cross ways to a high degree of scientific engineering. Super strong and super light pre fabricated structures that could be dropped into place over night. Structures that would take up much less space. One way to make these over/under passes smaller and take up less room is to make streets that were either all over or all under so truck traffic could use the overs and deliver their cargo. Only cars would be able to use unders so the size could be limited. Every overpass that is installed will free up not just one road but two roads will suddenly move faster and accommodate much more traffic. As much as twice the traffic and in some cases even more! I picture a city in which every thing is designed to keep traffic moving with absolutely no impediments. It is too bad that we didn't follow that time line. Our pollution problems wouldn't be as bad. We would be using far less gasoline. Cars would last longer and maybe road rage would be a rare thing. That is probably to much to hope for but the benefits of that time line are unimaginably prosperous. Instead we pursue a time line where we have developed a highly efficient way to stop vehicles, slow traffic to a crawl and congest our city streets and waste valuable time and resources. Our constrictive road policies have now become life threatening for our civilization. After we have initiated congestive heart failure by severely restricting our city streets we compound the problem by trying to shove too many vehicles onto the expressways, plugging up the arteries as well. We have gone out of our way to think up better ways to stop traffic. We have constricted our cities life's blood to a mere trickle. How efficient is it to spend 1 1/2 to 2 hours going to and from work every day. How efficient is it to have cars lined up for miles not moving but burning precious gasoline. How efficient is it to step on the gas and then brake to a stop at nearly every intersection. How efficient is it to have vehicles sitting at rest while pouring tons of pollution into the atmosphere. How efficiently are we killing our planet?

We need a, "Highways Prime Directive."

Have you noticed how often you run into road construction delays? You don't have to go far on our roads and freeways before you have to come to a grinding stop and wait to slowly crawl past road construction.   Have you noticed that miles and miles of freeway will be constricted to one lane and no work is being done on 99% of the closure. They promise that it will get better but it never does. it only gets worse The way we are doing things right now there will never be an end to it unless that end is total break down of the system. With that future in mind, what are we going to do about it. If stop and go traffic could be entirely eliminated there would be a shocking improvement in traffic flow, in the economy and our natural resources could be used for better things than polluting our air. It may seem unrealistic to think that we could entirely eliminate stop and go traffic but it is possible and that should be our goal. Road construction technology is still in the dark ages when compared with the advances other technologies have made. Road construction has not kept up with the other sciences. Why should it take months or years to complete projects. With the minds and technology we have today we should not have any trouble developing ways to construct and maintain roads in days instead of months and years. We did it in WW2 so why can't we do it now? There is no viable reason to close miles of highways for months or years at a time. There has to be ways to use prefabricated construction methods and better planning to do jobs in just days.

What is more important? Traffic or road construction.

     Smooth uninterrupted traffic flow is of supreme importance. Not road construction! Road construction should always be secondary to traffic flow. The simple minded moronic mentality seems to be that it is OK to stop and impede traffic at the drop of a hat with no thought as to the cost in wasted precious fuel, wasted precious lives due to construction related accidents, damaged property, and unnecessary planet killing pollution. It is becoming so prevalent that almost any time we venture onto the roads we are stopped by flag men. Our highway departments seem to have the attitude that construction is more important than the flow of commerce on our roadways. They appear to believe that construction has the right of way over traffic flow! Millions of cars and trucks are stopped every day in the U.S. alone and are burning hundreds of thousands of gallons of precious non replaceable fuel. If you multiply the cost of construction delays nation wide the it is staggering to the imagination. We want our government to cut costs? Well here is an area where with a little research they could cut cost, improve services and give the economy a huge shot in the arm! What a deal! Construction is of major importance. The thrust though should be to complete it with minimum impact and great speed

  

   During the fuel blockade in Britain the smog improved dramatically. Of course the improvement was due to less driving but if we could get into our cars and go to our destination with minimal stops we would see the same results.  Cars that are stopped for lights, stop signs and road construction pour out hundreds of thousands of tons of pollution into the atmosphere. There is a direct correlation between the amount of pollution and the incidence of respiratory disease. California passed extremely restrictive anti pollution laws even though it cost billions of dollars because it was shown to be cheaper than the tens of billions of dollars that would be spent in medical costs resulting from polluted air.

   Valuable time is lost while sitting in a roadblock. Business people, truckers, commercial firms all loose valuable working time and this in turn impacts retail prices and the economy.

   Many thousands lives are lost or ruined because of accidents directly related to stopping traffic not to mention the horrific medical expenses. What is needed is a "Highways Prime Directive." This should be a binding directive stating that traffic is the most important thing on our highways, not construction or maintenance and nothing should impede that traffic.

  the prime directive should say when construction and maintenance is necessary every effort should be made to provide streamlined detours that are adequate in that they do not impede the traffic. This would save the lives of motorist and construction workers. This directive should include funds that would finance research for more modern, overnight, instant, prefabricated and streamlined roadway construction. It should make it mandatory that only portions of the road under construction be shut down. It should lock companies into very strict time limits for completing the work The "Prime Directive" should also provide stiff penalties for vehicles that slow and impede traffic. There should be just as much emphases on slow vehicles as there is on speeders. It should set up a special highway tax from fuel and licensing taxes and forbid these taxes from going into the general fund or from using/borrowing them for any other purpose. This directive should set aside adequate moneys for maintenance and adequate moneys for improvements and development. Also this "Prime Directive," should include, a "Drivers bill of rights." A bill of rights for drivers makes more sense than many other bill of rights now being proposed. Drivers make up a true cross section of the population. The demographics of the typical driver transcends race, sex, religions, creeds and incomes. The driver is republican, democrat and independent. The driver is the perfect block of votes to sway people from all parties to vote for the politician that is championing the cause of unrestricted traffic. The driver is one of the most frustrated segments of our society and therefore ripe for change. The driver is not a minority but rather a large majority. I will leave it to others to work out the Prime Directive and the "Drivers Bill of Rights." My purpose on this page is to start people thinking and to persuade people to look at the way the highways are governed maintained and modernized. We as drivers need to unite because we make an awesome block of voters. We should begin now to demand change. We should demand a change in the way we view transportation issues and methods.

Broader Vision

   We can no longer afford to look at our neighborhood street without also considering how changes to it impact surrounding streets and highways. What we do to neighborhood streets impacts city streets and what we do to city streets affects the highways and freeways. If we restrict traffic in one area it throws more traffic onto other already overloaded thoroughfares. Every capillary, every vein and every artery needs to carry it's share of the traffic load.

A brave new City

   It will take a brave city with 20/20 future vision to turn around and go in the direction of eventually eliminating all stop lights, signs and construction delays but the rewards to that city will be the greatest economy ever imagined. It will have roadways that will handle many more cars per dollar budgeted for transportation. It will sponsor roadways who's average speed is 35 to 40  instead of  5 to 10 mile per hour because of stop and go traffic. If it is 4 miles to work and there are 13 stop lights it will take an average of 25 minutes to get to work but in a city with no lights or stop signs the average time to work would be closer to five minutes. For those stats I used my own personal experience driving to work. What city will be first to travel in time on a new time line? what city will show the rest of us the way to prosperity and urban health? Make it yours!

Singing a solo

   I realize that mine is a solo voice pleading for the removal of all stop lights, stop signs and other restrictions to traffic but maybe others who read this will join in and then we will have a chorus. Things won't change until enough people and companies and legislatures demand change. We can demand change or nature will affect a change and the toll nature will charge us will be almost unbearable. There can be a bright future for us but we have to turn around and head in the right direction. We can one day see millennial alabaster cites sparkle and gleam from prosperity, health and wealth or we can sit in our stopped cars, breathing in choking exhaust fumes, looking at our dismal future.

   I welcome your comments views, or even dissertations. Please email me at  wwindmills@comcast.net  I will be looking forward to hearing from you.

Update Nov 30, 2006

Traffic lights slow your average speed dramatically. You may be in a 30 MPH or 48 kilometers/PH but in actuality you may average less than 5 MPH or 8 KPH. Semaphores are a double edge sword because the heavier the traffic the less effectively they move that traffic and the further they back it up.