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Why is it called rush hour when nothing moves? :laugh:

Why is it called rush hour when nothing moves? :laugh:

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by: iamgr8 Active Indicator LED Icon 6 OP 
~ 4 years ago   Dec 9, '19 5:25pm  
Why is it called rush hour when nothing moves? Emoticon
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DEEDEE8 Active Indicator LED Icon 4
~ 4 years ago   Dec 9, '19 6:35pm  
@iamgr8 : LOL
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FairManor Active Indicator LED Icon 4
~ 4 years ago   Dec 9, '19 6:55pm  
Well, this is what happens when everybody rush:
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iamgr8 Active Indicator LED Icon 6 OP 
~ 4 years ago   Dec 9, '19 8:33pm  
@FairManor : lack of traffic control
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FairManor Active Indicator LED Icon 4
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 5:00am  
Well, there are traffic control lights and they are working... Emoticon
 
Or this is the only way to control:
www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-6239943 /Soldiers-form-Great -Human-Wall-con
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HiHoNeighbor Active Indicator LED Icon 7
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 7:29am  
Why do we drive in parking lots and park in driveways?
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iamgr8 Active Indicator LED Icon 6 OP 
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 7:47am  
@HiHoNeighbor : yes!!!
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iamgr8 Active Indicator LED Icon 6 OP 
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 7:50am  
@FairManor : nice!!!! but knowing some of our awesome drivers around here and the houston area, this barrier might get run over
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FairManor Active Indicator LED Icon 4
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 8:09am  
Especially when they don't have guns... Emoticon
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iamgr8 Active Indicator LED Icon 6 OP 
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 8:21am  
@FairManor : eh, in some cases that doesn't even stop people from trying. they might not have a great outcome but they'll try anyways.
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djohn78 Active Indicator LED Icon 13
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 10:29am  
I saw an interesting report from John Stossel who claimed that if we eliminated traffic lights, traffic would run smoother and there would be less accidents (Because people are more attentive).
I found a similar report on stop signs.
 
Traffic court in Warren, Mich., is a busy place. Sometimes, the courtroom is so crowded it's standing room only. Clutching their tickets, dozens of people line up at the cashier's windows to pay their fines. Many people are here because a cop said they didn't come to a full stop at a stop sign.
 
Though some drivers try to dispute the cops' versions of what happened, judges tend to believe the cops.
 
One police officer, David Kanapsky, generated many of those stop sign tickets.
 
As one judge explained to a woman who insisted she had come to a full stop, "Both statements cannot be true. I find Officer Kanapsky's testimony to be credible. He is an unbiased witness."
 
Is Kanapsky really unbiased? The more tickets he wrote, the more overtime he got. Last year, Kanapsky increased his pay by more than $20,000, most of which came from his time in court.
 
Kanapsky wouldn't talk to ABC News about this, but people he and his fellow officers ticketed did. After paying his ticket for running a stop sign, one man told us, "How do you fight it? It's your word against the cop. ... The judge is gonna believe the cop, not what you're saying."
 
Tickets for Profit?
In Michigan, cruising through a stop sign is a moving violation -- two points on your record. That drives up your car insurance costs. So to avoid the points, the judges let most everyone plead guilty to a lesser offense, "impeding traffic."
 
It's like an assembly line. Driver after driver agrees to pay the $135 fine; some even gratefully thank the judge for giving them a break. And then, one after the other, they pay their fines.
 
Give me a break.
 
Last year, the city of Warren made half a million dollars from these tickets.
 
One man who feels he was unfairly ticketed told ABC News, "It definitely seems like a money-making scam to me. If it was anyone other than our city government, it would be considered illegal."
 
Another man said, "They're just out there for the money. That's the bottom line."
 
Kanapsky's flood of stop sign tickets got the attention of Detroit's ABC affiliate reporter Heather Catallo. Her WXYZ investigative report on Kanapsky's ticketing blizzard led to a tip from a viewer that the cops weren't following the same rules they enforced on the rest of the city.
 
So Catallo took her cameras out to see if the cops stopped at the stop signs. Most, it turned out, did not.
 
"On two different days, we sat at the stop sign for several hours and we saw 25 cop cars roll through the stop sign," Catallo told "20/20." "Almost every cop car that we saw rolled through the sign. There were a few that stopped and there were a few that did what I call sort of a questionable stop, where they paused, and so we sort of gave them the benefit of the doubt. But 25 absolutely rolled through it."
 
Mayor: 'We Want to Make Sure the Road is Safe'
Her report caused a ruckus in Warren. Recently elected Mayor Jim Fouts, who promised reform if elected, called the ticketing "an unacceptable double standard."
 
"Citizens have to be treated fairly, and obviously police officers have to understand that they represent the law and they can't be above the law," Fouts told ABC News.
 
"We're here to enforce the law," he said. "We want to make sure the road is safe for the citizens. But we're not going to engage in trivial pursuit or technical 'gotchas' in order to make revenue."
 
Fouts hired William Dwyer, a veteran police official, as the city's new police commissioner. Dwyer had been on the job for five weeks when he told me the cops who didn't stop may have been going to the aid of another officer.
 
"It's not uncommon for an officer to hear a call for service to come out on a disturbance or family trouble. ... That's very common in law enforcement."
 
"Wouldn't they have their lights on?" I asked.
 
"Not necessarily. They would go as a backup," Dwyer said. "They don't necessarily have to have their lights and sirens on."
 
"But the tape showed cars doing it on the way back to the police station. Was there an emergency at the station?"
 
"I certainly can't justify officers going through a stop sign coming back to the station," Dwyer admitted. "Did some officers make mistakes? Perhaps so."
 
I also asked Dwyer about the thousands of tickets written by Kanapsky. "Doesn't that make it seem like this is just a moneymaking scam?"
 
Dwyer said no.
 
"When you are a traffic officer, that's your primary responsibility, to enforce the traffic code of the state," he said. "So it's not unusual for a traffic officer anywhere, in any department, to write 10 to 20 traffic violations a day, if not more."
 
Problem Solved
Now, Kanapsky's been told not to write any more stop sign tickets. And the stop sign where he wrote so many?
 
After receiving so many complaints from drivers, the city of Warren conducted a study and concluded the sign's placement was -- surprise -- "incorrect due to the natural traffic flow in that area." The state agreed and the stop sign has now been changed to a yield sign!
 
According to the police, "A recent check of reported crash reports at that location show that between Jan. 16, 2008, and May 21, 2008, there have been no accidents reported. During that same time frame in 2007, there were four crashes reported. Not only has the sign location been corrected, but it has resulted in less traffic accidents."
 
That's good news, but it's unfortunate that so many people had to get tickets before it was fixed.
 
To all those cops who would punish us for doing what they do, I say, "Give me a break."
abcnews.go.com/2020/ Stossel/story?id=525 3654
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djohn78 Active Indicator LED Icon 13
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 10:36am  
Here is the stop light report:
In my book, "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity," I bet my readers $1,000 that they couldn't name one thing that government does better than the private sector.
 
I have yet to pay.
 
Free enterprise does everything better.
 
Why? Because if private companies don't do things efficiently, they lose money and die. Unlike government, they cannot compel payment through the power to tax.
 
Even when a private company operates a public facility under contract to government, it must perform. If it doesn't, it will be "fired" -- its contract won't be renewed. Government is never fired.
 
Contracting out to private enterprise isn't the same thing as letting fully competitive free markets operate, but it still works better than government.
 
Roads are one example that I'll cover on my TV show this week. Politicians call road management a "public good" that "government must control." Nonsense.
 
In 1995, a private road company added two lanes in the middle of California Highway 91, right where the median strip used to be. It then used "congestion pricing" to let some drivers pay to speed past rush-hour traffic.
 
Using the principles of supply and demand, road operators charge higher tolls at times of day when demand is high. That encourages those who are most in a hurry to pay for what they need.
 
It was the first time anywhere in the world that congestion pricing was used. Bureaucrats were skeptical. Now congestion pricing is a hot idea for both private and public road management systems.
 
Likewise, for years there was a gap in the ring road surrounding Paris that created huge traffic problems. Then private developers made an unsolicited proposal to build a $2 billion toll tunnel in exchange for a 70-year lease to run it.
 
They built a double-decker tunnel that fits six lanes of traffic in the space usually required for just two.
 
The tunnel's profit-seeking owners have an incentive to keep traffic moving. They collect tolls based on congestion pricing, and tolls are collected electronically, so cars don't have to stop. The tunnel operators clear accidents quickly.
 
Most are detected within 10 seconds -- thanks to 350 cameras inside the tunnel. The private road has cut a 45-minute trip to 10 minutes.
 
Indiana used to lose money on its toll road. Then Gov. Mitch Daniels leased it to private developers. Now it makes a profit.
 
The new owners spent $40 million on electronic tolling. That's saved them 55 percent on toll collection. They saved $20 per mile by switching to a better deicing fluid. They bought a new fleet of computerized snowplows that clear roads using less salt.
 
Drivers win, and taxpayers win.
 
It also turns out that government roads often run more smoothly when drivers have more, not less, freedom.
 
This sounds paradoxical. Politicians often sneer at libertarians, saying, "You want to get rid of traffic lights?!" Well, yes, actually. In some cases, traffic moves better and more safely when government removes traffic lights, stop signs, even curbs.
 
It's Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous" order in action: Instead of sitting at a mechanized light waiting to be told when to go, drivers meet in an intersection and negotiate their way through by making eye contact and gesturing.
 
The secret is that drivers must pay attention to their surroundings -- to pedestrians and other cars -- rather than just to signs and signals. It demonstrates the "Peltzman Effect" (named after retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman): People tend to behave more recklessly when their sense of safety is increased. By removing signs, lights and barriers, drivers feel less safe, so they drive more carefully. They pay more attention.
 
In Drachten, Holland, lights and signs were removed from an intersection handling about 30,000 cars a day. Average waiting times dropped from 50 seconds to less than 30 seconds. Accidents dropped from an average of eight per year to just one.
 
On Kensington High Street in London, after pedestrian railing and other traffic markers were removed, accidents dropped by 44 percent.
 
"What these signs are doing is treating the driver as if they were an idiot," says traffic architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie. "If you do so, drivers exhibit no intelligence."
 
Once again, freedom and responsibility triumph.
 
www.foxnews.com/opin ion/john-stossel-scr ap-the-traffic-light s-give-private-
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iamgr8 Active Indicator LED Icon 6 OP 
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 10:41am  
@djohn78 : i do believe traffic signs/lights do cause more issues than anything. hence, traffic "control". they added a new light by my house and several others down another road. traffic USED to be smooth now i have to add an additional 15 minutes to my drive to work. INSANE. i do believe it's all for a profit. yay *sigh* plus, i have seen more accidents with people running lights. i cannot tell you how many fatalities or near fatalities have happened in front of my subdivision because people run these dang lights.
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djohn78 Active Indicator LED Icon 13
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 10:43am  
@iamgr8 :
Plus we would have more police officers patroling instead of waiting for people to run a stop sign.
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DEEDEE8 Active Indicator LED Icon 4
~ 4 years ago   Dec 10, '19 10:46am  
@djohn78 : That is a good idea!!!! Maybe that will happen one day.
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