© 2007 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
City traffic lights have the potential to really ease driving hassles for us, or they can be a major pain in the keister. Well, it is not the traffic lights themselves, since they only act as they are programmed by the core values of their controlling organization. Said differently, traffic lights can be programmed to reduce our aggravation or they can cause unnecessary frustration.
What if traffic lights were run by a business? Do you think you would go a block, get a red light, go another block and get another red light? We call them red lights for a reason. Traffic lights are programmed by governments who turn a blind eye to their irritation of drivers.
At a city meeting a citizen proclaimed, “If I ran an airport like you run the city streets, all the planes would take off and none would return.” Bingo.
Governments do not operate like businesses, which is too bad. I am a big fan of the business model of interaction. Businesses know that the customer is not always right, but the customer always has the money.
The American concept of liberty is not what you can do, but what you cannot be made to do. We know we are in the land of the free by what we can refuse to do. Especially with small businesses, the customers can refuse the offer of financial exchange at any moment. Then the business is stuck with lots of widgets and no money. For me to buy a widget, the company has to do something so that I voluntarily get off of my Barcalounger and hush my puppies to the store.
Fundamentally, the goal of business is to please people; the goal of government is to control people. There is a vast gulf between the operating principles. Business relies on voluntary interaction with customers while governments have the police and military enforce their actions.
Both want people to do things but businesses have to deal with our freedom to not interact with them. Businesses aggravate their customers at the risk of their existence.
Unlike businesses, governments often think very little about the frustrations and aggravations of the citizens. They do not worry that the citizens will choose some other government. Yes, they give lip service to the notion that they are the “servants of the citizens” but talk is just talk – their actions say otherwise.
Increasing gas mileage
Governments are tasked with some pretty important stuff. They must protect the citizens from foreign and domestic bad people. Then what? I believe governments, especially local governments, must look carefully at the interaction they foster and control to see if there are unnecessary hassles.
Some hassles are inevitable, while others could be helped. There is no reason for government to make things worse than they need to be. Namely, what most citizens deal with every day is a government that talks about conserving, saving resources, etc. But the same government does not streamline the local travel via traffic light synchronization.
If the government really wants to increase gas mileage, reduce the number of needless stops we make each day because the traffic lights are not timed. Perhaps we could set a national standard so that motorists traveling near the speed limit find 80 percent of the lights green. Wow, think of how neat that would be.
Movement must start at the local level
Is it easy to do? Perhaps not, but we do not know because the needless expenditure of fuel with traffic lights that are not synchronized is not even on the table. If local governments really want to help citizens, they must spend whatever it takes to synchronize the major arterial routes in town so that there is less hassle for drivers.
If you want to make a safety issue out of this, in areas where the lights are synchronized drivers tend to drive at the speed of synchronizing. Other than testosterone drivers, most of us really don’t want to jackrabbit off the line and then quickly come to a complete stop and then do it again and again.
So when will the synchronizing of city traffic lights make it on the table? I hope it will soon, for the money it will save individuals, the frustration it will forestall and the safety it will provide.
This could be a national and state initiative as well. The traffic light synchronizing technology is just one “ah ha!” away from mainstream use. What it takes are citizens who pepper the politicians with the vision the politicians should have had in the first place.
First we must get this issue on the table of discussion with local governments. There is no reason to waste the fuel and tolerate the aggravation.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.