I’ve been driving the wife to work this week, due to her unfortunate knee incident (She’s seeing an orthopedist on Monday, we think she hurt her MCL), and that involves taking 66 into the city. Now, at 7am, that’s not bad. It’s HOV-2, and traffic is light.
However, they already have the metered ramps turned on. Along the entrance ramps to 66, they have traffic lights, where they allow one car per lane to go at a time. The light is red, someone arrives at the light, it turns green for one car. Great system when traffic is heavy – it prevents a big pile of cars trying to merge all at once. Unless the backup gets really bad, and then it doesn’t do any good.
My point, and I do have one, is that these meters have sensors in the road so they know when a car comes. So they know how heavy traffic is. And therefore, they could turn themselves off when there is one car coming by every minute or two, when the lights are totally unnecessary. They could also turn themselves off when the traffic is so heavy that they don’t make any difference at all.
Is that too much to ask? I have the email of someone at VDOT now from the whole Seven Corners debacle. I haven’t contacted him yet. I should – now that the election is over, I’ve been swept under the rug, it seems.