TheGrinch wrote:
About a dozen years ago I had occasion to attend a 1-week course at the Univ. of MD called "Traffic Engineer Short Course". Basically, it was for traffic and design engineers to get required continuing education credits for their respective professions. I however, was, shall we say, an outsider - I was attending to see why these people did some of the stuff they did.
While I did learn some information, I did get one experienced traffic engineer to admit that a lot of what they did was busy work to justify their positions.
Personally, I would want to see the traffic counts and crash data of ANY intersection any DOT was going to modify. There should be a threshold in a number of crashes to volume of vehicles ratio. Especially the T-Bone, since that is what they are attempting to prevent.
Just my $0.02
I never had the opportunity to attend a traffic engineering course but I have had the unfortunate opportunity to extricate many people from dangerous intersection crashes… I was also often required to testify in resulting law suits…
I can honestly say the most often question asked by local people that know and use these intersections is how many need to be killed and maimed before someone does something…
I doubt many of these changes happen before numerous traffic counts and crash data studies have been done (maybe to many)… when something is done it is generally a inconvenience for those that are always in a hurry, as these modifications would be… all the inconveniences they cause is well worth saving one life if they work…
While I am not a round-about fan at all and like the fly over concept better, they are more costly and the round-abouts do slow traffic and seem to work as intended for the most part…
