7/23    Are all traffic engineers imbeciles or is it just the Silicon
        Valley? I was at an intersection where the green light was
        letting cars through 2 seconds at a time on an 8-lane street
        but letting cars through a minute at a time for a 4-lane street.
        \_ Pretty much all imbeciles. In my city there's a road that has
           two lights in close succession - maybe 20 feet from each other.
           For years they were set so that they turned red and green
           together and you could go on your way. Someone had the bright idea
           to set them so that when the first one turns green the other one
           stays red for a couple of minutes longer which makes traffic
           pile up into the intersection. Brilliant!
           \- non-idiot: http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman
        \_ Yes. Just look at 110 freeway in Southern Cal. The 10/110
           junction is idiotically designed. Also look at the 405 and
           101 junction. Why the hell they placed exits and entrances
           the way they are now, and why they can't do anything about
           it to fix the problem, is just idiotic. A friend of mine
           had a dad who worked at Rockwell and was laid off in the 80s
           and hired as a CalTrans engineer in the 90s said CalTrans was
           very laid back and they don't really care about anything except
           to follow legal and civil engineering rules. They know absolutely
           nothing about operations research or flow optimizations.
           \- i thought LA was supposed to be the well-run traffic system ...
              although i guess operations is different from design.
              when i have spoken to "transit people" [not engineers], i dont
              seem to get very good answers to "why do the carpool hours
              not make sense" "why is the echchange from MajorFwyA to MajorFwyB
              which is not in an especually crowded area one lane" "why was
              the cost estimate for the new bay bridge that far off" "why have
              they been closing a lane of the lower bay bridge for part of the
              day for say 5years now?" etc. i do understand that the avg
              traffic engineer may have very few degrees of freedom to
              fix stuff liek this. maybe their lives are something out of
              The Wire|The Sopranos.
           \_ Wait, I thought commuting by auto was far superior than by
              public transit. How can this be, if everyone designing the
              freeways is so incompetent? Perhaps they should hire DBAs
              from the private sector to do all their engineering for them.
              \_ The same morons are the ones designing public transit.
        \_ The only decent traffic engineers I know of are the ones working for
           NJDOT. The NJ turnpike is amazing.