Dear editor:
A generation ago, we went from mostly right-of-way intersections to mostly four-way stops. This was more fair. It was safer. It was (you could say) progress.
Not only were four-way stops an improvement, but there was a calming effect. A moment to take your bearings, to fish out your wallet and check to see if you remembered your bank card, a moment to calm the kids in the backseat. A calming effect; that is, if you are not an impatient, irrational person, always trying to push your way through.
But progress, as they say, “never stops there.”
These days, fairness isn’t enough: Things must be equitable (which is a word like fair and should mean fair but somehow ends up being more expensive).
Making intersections equitable requires the involvement of social science and a lot of money for cultural impact studies, traffic studies and road construction. To be progressive, to show that you are making progress, one really should have as many traffic circles as possible.
But the traffic circle is, in some respects, a return to the right-of-way. If a procession of cars chooses to push through on the same road or turn left, then opposing traffic to the right must wait for as long as it takes or (not recommended) attempt to push harder and make their way in.
Perhaps the new idea is that traffic should be constantly pushed, without stopping, with as seldom a stop as possible; drivers should have their foot somewhere between the brake and the gas.
Just like the mayor’s politics: Isn’t he pushing this change on the town, pushing his will on the unwilling, pushing, pushing, pushing?
And the survey he sent out is more of the same. Choice is pushed and packed into a not-a-choice. A push for “public feedback” that ticks the democratic-process box for the social scientist: The people can be consulted but not, on the whole, trusted, and all the participation must be, implicitly, for the change. A sort of Manufacturing Consent Lite.
Our progressive, sociological democracy in action. The interests for the traffic circle push, the people against the traffic circle push back and, despite the best arguments (even, in spite of, the best arguments), the bigger push wins.
Jeremy Langton
NOTL
