As a man quickly approaching 70 years of age, who has lived his entire life in Vancouver, who got his driver’s licence at age 16 and continues (in his own mind) to be an excellent and skilled driver, and who always considered himself to be both patient and lawful behind the wheel, I am now almost afraid to leave my house for fear of “losing it.”
I used to be horrified by accounts in the media of road rage; now I’m horrified I might become a perpetrator. And what, you might ask, is driving an old guy to forgo his lifelong habits of responsible vehicle operation? Is it the plethora of “N” drivers who would never have passed the driver’s exam I took 56 years ago?
Is it the unthinking driver who crawls through a left-turn light at a speed designed to ensure the 10 cars behind will never get through (and then pulls a U turn)? Is it the young and the restless who defy death in the right lane? Is it the slow but relentless loss of driving lanes as our supreme beings proselytize on the advantages of riding one’s bikes in newly minted bike lanes? Or maybe it’s the omnipotent power given to pedestrians who can stop traffic on a whim and by the push of a button.
The answer is, to some extent, all of them but with a caveat – they are the products of a systematic attempt by local government to reduce traffic flow. And what’s a great way to do that? Make it so time-consuming to get anywhere in a vehicle that people give up trying. And what’s one of the best ways to make sure you slow down traffic to a crawl? Simple! Don’t program traffic lights to synchronize with each other. In fact, don’t program them at all, which then allows pedestrian to stop traffic, a left-lane light to take precedence over the main roadway, or simply for the next light to turn red because it feels like it.
So let me give you one of dozens of examples of how environmentally unfriendly this lack of synchronization is. I live on the South Slope of Burnaby and travel far too frequently to the Costco store just north of the Willingdon/freeway interchange. Google maps tells me it’s a distance of 5.2 km and should take 12 minutes. But Google maps doesn’t know there are 11 vehicle traffic lights and four pedestrian-actuated lights within that 5.2 km, and not one is synchronized. I happen to agree with Google that the trip should take 12 minutes, but not in one’s wildest dreams is that ever going to happen – at least at a time of day when Costco is open. Instead, my average time for that journey is 19 minutes, which means I have an average speed of 16.4 km/hr.
Except I don’t! At one stage in the journey I can see three lights in a row, and if it looks like I can catch the next green light I stomp on the accelerator, often achieving ballistic speeds before more often than not having to hit the brakes hard because some pedestrian has decided to interrupt the flow of traffic. Like half the driving population of the Lower Mainland, I drive a Ford F150, which aren’t noted for good fuel economy, so this rapid starting and stopping is both hard on my truck, hard on my wallet and, even more importantly, hard on the environment. I’m surprised mayors Corrigan and Robinson haven’t figured out, given their environmental persuasions, that idling and accelerating vehicles put far more fumes into the air than cars maintaining a legal speed through properly timed traffic lights.
Not only does the lack of traffic light synchronization lead me and a great many others to speed to the next light, but much worse and far more dangerous is the inclination to run yellow lights to the point they are almost red. Have you noticed the number of bright flashes at intersections lately? These are cameras capturing the moment a vehicle runs a red light, and I see these flashes in ever-increasing numbers. Great revenue source for government – but that’s my cynical side showing.
Long and short, it’s about time city governments put the talents of their engineering departments to good use. They need to look at all their major traffic arteries and synchronize those lights to keep traffic moving at legal speed. Pedestrians can wait for their walk lights and left turns, and bicycles can wait for their lights till a break occurs in the traffic flow. And I will no longer feel the need to speed, run yellow lights, curse the powers that be or take a Valium.
Peter Madden is a Burnaby resident.
