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From the Roundtable: Stop red-light cameras, green-light count-down signals and get in sync

From the Roundtable: Stop red-light cameras, green-light count-down signals and get in sync

Worth noting are a couple of interesting segments last week during KFRU’s “Morning Meeting” while Renée Hulshof was guest co-host with Simon Rose. How refreshing to have a woman on the local airwaves. Donning my critic’s hat momentarily, Renée’s role on KFRU should be firmed up and continued, which I understand may just be what is going to happen.

The first session with Columbia assistant city manager Tony St. Romaine could have been subtitled Chapter CXVII in the continuing wrestling match between the City of Columbia and LaserCraft, of Norcross, Ga. This is the ongoing drama involving the installation and maintenance of a series of so-called red-light cameras at a quartet of busy Columbia intersections. Of course, attorneys have joined the dispute, with McKenna Long and Aldridge, of Washington, D.C., representing LaserCraft on the mat with Columbia’s own in-house solicitor as they attempt to move the long-delayed project along.

No one will deny that running though any protected intersection is egregiously dangerous. With hundreds of potentially hazardous intersections across the city that should be monitored, the City Council’s mandate to install these cameras at a handful of spots seems trifling and insignificant.

The permanency of each installation entails digging up the streets and running cables at the same time the fixtures are installed on poles planted in concrete. The Missouri Department of Transportation becomes a participant at certain intersections because the state maintains some streets within Columbia’s limits (that’s an incredible folly I’ll leave for a subsequent future blast).  MoDOT’s involvement of course means an opportunity for more regulatory obfuscation and delay.

Has anyone thought about the fundamental reason some drivers run red lights or stop signs or fail to halt when making a right turn? The bulletin here: it’s primarily the public’s frustration with traffic control. The better response to the problem would be the implementation of flow-enhancing devices that would assuage our anger. That’s where the session with two MoDOT traffic engineers last week on KFRU turned out to be frustrating and not very enlightening.

It seemed to me their answers were vague and evasive, filled with technical argot while couched in the tone of “we know what we’re doing and you don’t because we’re engineers” (I should know; I grew up in a family of engineers). These lower level technicians are going to be cautious, deliberate and vague because they’re told to be.

Every one of us probably has a favorite intersection to curse and scorn. Diabolical situations where the light always seems hung-up on red, the turn lane that’s “engineered” to handle only a couple of vehicles and the notorious absence of inter-connected (by wire) signal synchronization (and not just timed lights), the technology for which has been available since the 1920s.

Columbia’s most brilliant stroke at traffic control and law abidance in recent years has been the installation of count-down timers at a number of intersections. The pilot project downtown was designed for pedestrians but oh how helpful those indicators have become to motorists navigating a number of downtown streets. While the lights on Broadway appear to be timed-though sometimes out of whack-the next move would be a hard-wired system of synchronization.

Count-down timers should be mandatory at every signalized intersection. There should be a survey to determine the most irritating intersections followed by a full court press to make them less hostile and likely to be violated. Another radical thought would be investing in a computerized traffic control facility linking all the signals to a command post at the Joint Communications Facility.

I believe the cockeyed bifurcated city-MoDOT regime that currently rules the roost of city street construction-maintenance and traffic control should be examined but that will have to wait for another day.

Bring on the LaserCraft cameras. Let’s test their legality in the courts. Then sit down and watch. At one of the intersections with red-light cameras-Providence and Worley-it is always interesting watching east-west traffic ripping across Providence on the swale of uneven pavement that binds a city-maintained pavement across a state highway. I assume part of the LaserCraft equipment package includes countdown timers to warn-lest we be “trapped” – when the light is going to change. I think a judge somewhere would insist on it.

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