What is 10 seconds?

I went to meet a friend at Rudy’s Barbeque for lunch today. Hearing of the tremendous progress being made on FM802 and the project nearing completion, I decided to take it coming westbound from Highway 48. Traffic moved smoothly until I got to the Margaret Clark swimming pool, the horror story begins there.

As I crept my way towards Paredes Line road, traffic moving at an average speed of less than 1.5 miles per hour, I thought I would lose some of it turning onto Paredes. Was I wrong! From all my reading, the unnecessary highway construction was nearing completion and traffic should flow smoothly. That is fine, if your definition of smoothly is “near standstill”. Was there an accident up ahead? None could be seen from my vantage point of where the bicycle trail crosses 802 near the North side bus stop. As time wore on (and my patience wore thin), I spent the next 20 minutes slowly (that word has new meaning for me now) working my way to the split, where traffic is diverted back onto the finished section. One would have figured that the bottleneck would have opened up and traffic would have started moving smoothly. Not the new, official definition of “dead standstill”, but smoothly in sense of the common usage. As you may have gathered from my sarcastic tone, nothing could be further from the truth.

From my new perch, I could see the string of traffic lights and the entire string of cars past the mall, up to the 77 intersection. My phone rang. It was my friend asking my whereabouts. When I told him, and he said “Bad move!” I had no choice but to agree. He took my order, because time was running short. I hung up, and stared straight ahead, because it was my only option.

Studying the light timing (something the “Person in Charge”) has obviously never done, I noticed something that came as a bit of a shock (but I don’t know why); the lights were timed to concentrate standstill traffic right in front of the mall! I am not exaggerating nor pulling your leg! The timing to accomplish this monumental feat of stupidity could not have been done better to accomplish this goal had a team of NASA engineers with 3 Cray computers designed it.

When I reached Starbucks, and Bennigans was only minutes away, I called my friend back to report my relative progress. He told me that if he had to go, he would leave my lunch with the kitchen staff and give them my name. I said that I understood, as it had already been almost an hour since he called me for lunch.

About here is where I intend to skin that worthless bastard, City slug “traffic engineer”. I don’t know who it is, but he has a name. I want to see that name with the prefix of “Former employee” in front of it on Christmas Day. He, of all people deserves to be fired on Christmas Eve. He is an idiot of the lowest order and shouldn’t be breathing, let alone getting paid for a job that he evidently is not doing. I wish to write something here that would be truly libelous about that sorry excuse for a human being, just so I could defend myself in open court with the truth, while repeating my statements over and over, then repeating them on a megaphone on the courthouse steps after the case is dismissed, with prejudice. He has got to be the sorriest excuse for a traffic engineer I have ever heard of! In case this follower of the testament of Bozo lives in a total vacuum, I wish to remind him that the City spent nearly a million dollars on a study called Imagine Brownsville, whose first poll of public sentiment can be summed up as “It’s the streets, stupid!”

There is, of course, the possibility that I am wrong, and he has been simply dead at his desk with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door for many, many months. Has anyone taken a nose count at staff meetings lately? Checking with Finance to see if he is cashing his checks would be a step I would take in a real city, but based on recent events, I think it would add further to the confusion.

Now that I have finished wailing away on this turkey, I am going to TELL you what to do. This is not a suggestion, this is a FACT: Increase the “Green light” timing on the westbound lane at FM 802 and US 77 by EXACTLY 10 seconds and the lights following at the underpass and Central Blvd intersection accordingly. I don’t want to hear any lame excuses, although hearing anything from you would be better than the buckets of silence we have suffered through. CITY COMMISSIONERS: Make the traffic department produce this idiot at a Commission meeting and ask him why he hasn’t done this. If he has a reason, it is a lie or simply something stupid he made up.

You don’t have a “traffic congestion problem” IF YOU DON’T CONGEST TRAFFIC!

By the time I arrived at Rudy’s my friend had already left, so I ate my sandwich alone and planned all afternoon what I was going to write this evening.

"Of course I know. It is my business to know." -The Merovingian