Most highway departments have made a real effort to keep the messages simple, but there are times when the signs themselves are the source of delays, as we hear from one reader who wrote in to say, “On the Saturday of the [daylight-saving] change, I got on the Beltway at Georgia Avenue heading towards Virginia. To my dismay the traffic was at a crawl. However, after we passed the Mormon Temple and reached the first … sign the traffic picked up and moved at the speed limit. A two-panel notice about smoke detectors and daylight-saving time had traffic down to a crawl.
“That’s not the first time I’ve seen a sign be [the cause of] a bottleneck. I’m sure the people who do the signs are trying to do the best they can, but they don’t seem to have the slightest idea the impact of what they write has.
“This weekend, marathon signs were so chock-full of information that if you really wanted to read them, you couldn’t go 55 mph.
“Fortunately most people after seeing the same message multiple times probably just didn’t give them a second look. The signs need to be as concise as they can on one panel.”
At the same time, it seems anything that pops up over or alongside the road creates a problem.
We tend to get stuck in our routines and make sure to slow down and take a long look at anything that disrupts it.
Kathy writes in response to a reader comment in a previous column: “There ARE way too many four-car Blue trains during rush hour. You have to let train after train go by because you can’t pack in (I board in Foggy Bottom). Meanwhile, there are 12 to 18 Orange cars between the four-car Blue trains (if three orange trains come through between the Blue ones, you get 18 cars).
“Also, sometimes they’ll just run the Blue train through the station without stopping and there are then 24 Orange cars between the four-car blue trains.
“Also, it’s much more likely the trains will get too packed and then they say ‘door problem’ and offload the entire train at the Pentagon because they’re too lazy to find out who’s causing the door problem; they just try to close the doors a few times, warning that leaning on the door causes it to not close, and then they’ll have to offload the entire train — everyone then gets punished because some jerk on that train is leaning against the door and they can’t just bring the kiosk person down to check the doors and get that problem person off the train — everyone instead has to get off the train.”
It’s a balancing act, and the Blue Line trains seem to get the short end.
At the same time, the allocation of trains was and is based on usage. I would imagine that things will begin to change before the end of the year as more new trains come into service.
Questions, comments, random musings? Write to [email protected].
