Do officials ever have to commute?

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, August 25, 2001

It’s really easy to understand the recent troubles on the Broadway Street bridge overcrossing – too many cars and not enough roads. What isn’t easy to understand is why this road closure caught state and local transportation officials by surprise. On second thought, that’s not too surprising either. After all, they don’t travel these roads. Oh, their chauffeurs might while they sit in relative comfort in the back seat. Even then, they don’t travel during rush hours. They travel during the uncrowded times of say, 10 to 3. Unlike we working stiffs, they don’t see the mind bogging traffic jams. They sit in some tower somewhere watching numbers on a screen.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out very quickly that closing this bridge for maintenance was going to create massive traffic problems. Come on people, wake up! Get out there with those who rely on these roads for the basics of life before you make these dumb decisions. Why can’t you do this at night and only on one lane at a time?

There is almost nothing about California that I like. But, you have to hand it to the folks who design their roads and schedule their maintenance. This sort of thing would never happen there. As an example, the Mukilteo Speedway was widened last year. It was never very easy to travel on the best of days and really needed widening. Of course, the project caused heavy traffic jams and some delays. However, if a person decided to turn left off of the speedway and onto a side street, this act would instantly cause the traffic to back up into the next intersection and, of course, block it. It was only when this idiot finished the left hand turn that traffic would get back to some sort of normalcy. The solution – temporarily ban left-hand turns onto that street for the betterment of all who travel the speedway. Did the traffic managers think of this? No. I’ll bet not one of them used the Speedway while it was being widened.

I think its time for the public to demand better management of our roads. Tell them that these crippling interruptions will not be tolerated. Demand that they do this work at night and on weekends. This minor inconvenience for them will at least give us poor commuters a decent chance of being home at a reasonable hour. We, that is, you and I, pay for these roads, their maintenance and, unfortunately, the miscreants who manage them. We hired them. We can fire them.

Mukilteo