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Dr. Delay
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 16, 2003
After years of writing this column, Jessie and I have determined through informal poll and angst level measurements that the traffic issue most annoying to drivers in southern Pinellas County is the timing of traffic lights.
Wait. Don't go away. For those of you who don't drive the new Bryan Dairy/118th Avenue corridor, we are not about to launch into another discourse on the traffic light situations up there. We're done with that for the time being. It's all being fixed, though probably not as fast as the users of the roads would like.
No, we are referring to traffic light timing in general, everywhere from Pinellas Point to Roosevelt/East Bay.
As we have reported before, some months ago, local officials have heard your frustration. And they promised to try to do something about it. Alas, the effort has stalled on issues that might best be termed parochial.
The plan, we told you, was for the county to take over traffic light control from the cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater, blend it into new county-wide technology and control traffic signals on all thoroughfares from a central facility. This would enable changes in light timing to accommodate accidents, heavy traffic and construction. The hope was to get traffic flowing more smoothly county-wide.
The county even offered to pay for it.
But as Times reporter Lisa Greene wrote recently in north-county editions of this very newspaper, the plan has fallen on hard times. The two cities have been only lukewarm to the idea. County Commissioner Karen Seel and some of her colleagues called it "a turf issue."
That didn't do anything to assuage the tension.
Clearwater Mayor Brian Aungst called the commissioners' comments "inflammatory."
In St. Petersburg, Mayor Rick Baker and other city officials are talking about letting the county take control, but only in two corridors, U.S. 19 and 66th Street.
"We don't take lightly this possibility of someone else running our traffic system," Baker said. "It's not a decision we want to rush into."
Of course it isn't. But it isn't as if someone just came up with this idea last week.
It's been months and months and months.
It is time to stop talking about this and do something.
Perhaps Mayor Baker is onto something. A test, perhaps.
Do the two city corridors and see how it works out. Use them to demonstrate that a county-wide system will work just fine -- or to demonstrate that it won't.
If you are tired of waiting for your city officials to act, tell them so.
The number at the mayor's office is 893-7201.
City Council is 893-7117.
Just make the call.
A promising effort to stop red-light running, which was tested in the Clearwater area, has moved south to the intersection of Fourth Street N and Gandy Boulevard.
Next time you're through there, take a look at the traffic signals. You will see little white lights hanging under signals in all directions.
The drill has been that if a police officer ticketed a red-light runner, the officer had to witness the act from a vantage point from which he or she could eyeball the light turning red and then see a vehicle's front wheels cross the broad white stop bar at the intersection.
That's the definition of running a red, your front wheels cross the bar after the signal has changed.
So if the officer was sitting in a car at a diagonal to the runner, there might be a suspicion but no proof that the vehicle ran a red because the officer couldn't actually see the signal.
Then the white-light system came along.
The light goes on as soon as the signal turns red. If a cop is anywhere within sight of the stop bar and sees your front wheels cross the bar after the white light goes on, you're busted. He doesn't actually have to see the signal turn. The white light tells him it has.
Watch for those white lights at other intersections, and let us know when you see them. We'll pass it on.
Be forewarned.
Speaking of being forewarned, we were returning from Tampa one day recently and stopped on westbound Gandy at Dr. M.L. King (Ninth) Street N in the right lane. We looked up, and what we saw was a little scary.
At intersections that still have traffic signals hanging from wires -- Gandy and M.L. King Street being one of them -- the signals generally hang at the end of a brace that is connected to two wires, one over another.
In the right lane of westbound Gandy at this intersection, the brace is broken. Two-thirds of it is waving in the wind from the top wire. The signal and the remnant of the brace is hanging only by the bottom wire.
We didn't feel in imminent danger, though we blew through the intersection as quickly as we could on green so as not to dwell under the signal for too long. But we would have real qualms about it next month, when local weather gets very windy with the advent of spring.
With any luck, the state roadies will get out and replace the brace before the wind starts to howl.
Another warning. The state is in the midst of another Buckle Up Florida campaign, this one aimed at parents who let their children ride unrestrained.
It absolutely floored us to learn than in 2001, 4,675 children aged 5 and younger were killed or injured in Florida traffic crashes. If that isn't a Terrible Traffic Tidbit, then we've never seen one.
Until Feb. 23, in conjunction with National Child Passenger Safety Week, state law enforcement will be making a special effort to see than children are properly restrained. During the campaign, officers will show zero tolerance for both kids and adults who are not buckled up. No excuses will be accepted for not using safety restraints.
The fines for violations vary by county, but they're not cheap.
And while you're at it, think about restraining your pets. They're people, too.
-- Dr. Delay can be reached by e-mail at docdelay@sptimes.com , by fax at (727) 893-8675 or by snail mail at 490 First Ave., S, St. Petersburg 33701.