17- Lessons from Sight Line Improvements

Summary of events:

The sight line at Playhouse Lane and Route 212 was horrible, for years. Nobody did anything about it. I blogged about it and told Jeff Moran when he came to my house to campaign for reelection. Days later (cause and effect? who knows...) the bushes came down. But the signs put up in front of the bare berm created parking spaces that blocked the new, otherwise perfect sight line. Oops.

I blogged about that, but I guess nobody read it or cared, for about a month. Then, hours after I appeared on Cathy Magarelli's local access show (Thurs. Dec. 10) and explained why the "fixed" sight line was still blocked by the newly planted no parking signs on westbound Route 212, East of Playhouse Lane, the signs were moved. They were moved to the very edges of the stretch of road in question, so that the two legal parking spaces that were created by the signs are now gone. Hooray! (Cause and effect? Who knows.)

(The signs indicate that there is no parking between the signs. For that formula to work, the signs need to be at the very ends of the no parking stretch. If they are not, then parking outside the stretch between the signs appears, at least to me, to be legal.)

Discussion: Let us discuss this string of events in a more qualitative way than we have thus far:

While the town, or whoever moved the bushes and the signs is perhaps showing responsiveness to clear, factual analysis and direct suggestion (= good), it is frightening that the bushes were not moved earlier (=bad). It is even more frightening that in moving the bushes, the people in charge of this could not figure out that they were creating parking spaces that would defeat the purpose of the bushes removal (= scary bad).

What we must conclude from this is that the people handling these issues are not very observant, not very thoughtful, and not all that interested in safety (= scary bad x 3). If they were interested, they would pay closer attention, and not have to take their cues from neighborhood bloggers who appear on local access TV talk shows.

"Scary bad times 3" on safety issues is not a good grade for a group of people who are going to meddle with a key intersection in an already otherwise crowded town.