Los Angeles tinkers with signal light timing
As I posted earlier, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his sidekick, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, held a news conference this morning to announce that the city is going to adjust the timing of 60 traffic signals in Los Angeles to relieve known bottlenecks. The fix was being billed as Operation Bottleneck IV.
The idea is to give some motorists at key intersections more green-light time, which of course means some other streets will get more red. The city is already in the process of syncing all its traffic lights -- a project expected to be done in 2011 -- and that program gives the city engineers the ability to tinker more with individual lights. In this case, the idea is to get the lights to more accurately reflect traffic patterns.
The announcement was made in the city's traffic center, four stories underground in City Hall East. It's one of those cool rooms with a bunch of video monitors on the wall, and there's always a few traffic engineers diligently watching computer screens. Well, at least they are during news conferences.
Me being me, and clearly not intelligent nor caffeinated enough, I couldn't quite get my mind wrapped around the big news that lights were being adjusted. So when it was my turn to ask a question, I said:
"Not to sound like a grumpy bear, but isn't adjusting lights what these guys are supposed to be doing anyway? Or are they reading blogs all day?"
Villaraigosa agreed that I was a grumpy bear, then couldn't resist the softball I had just tossed him: "They're not reading your blog. I'm just going to be honest. The number of people who read your blog are going in the other direction, my friend."
Greuel loved that line. She practically fell over laughing at the mayor's joke. I was left wondering whose leaking my blog ratings to the mayor's office.
