Colin McEnroe’s column in the Courant today digs into the recent legislative action on gas prices, by way of a Hartford ode on traffic, dream of a roundabout, knock at the CT DOT and identifying Hartford legislators and their staffs as “stupidheads.” Highlights:
Modern roundabouts — the traffic intersection of choice in many other parts of the world — are statistically safer than signal intersections and they keep traffic moving more smoothly. For those reasons, they have been opposed by the Connecticut Department of Transportation, which believes that people are safest when they have just been in a traffic accident and when their cars cannot move at all.
Modern roundabouts are much smaller, generally, than Hartford’s Pulaski Circle, which seems to do a very good job of taking cars speeding off the Conland-Whitehead Highway and spinning them off to various locations. The very short highway was named after the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who described truth as movement through a series of experiences, and pedestrian James Conland, who described death as being run over by Alfred North Whitehead. If there were a traffic signal where the roundabout now is … you know, I don’t even want to think about what that would be like.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, because our legislature just spent hours and hours working out a plan under which, instead of charging you $4.49 per gallon, gas stations can now charge you $4.49 if you pay cash and $4.69 if you use a credit card. This is their idea of useful transportation policy.
The state refused for decades to build any high speed mass transit because there was no emergency. Now that there is an emergency, they will refuse to build it because it’s too late. Employers could let their workers “telecommute” from home a couple of days a week, but they are afraid that the workers will waste time looking at YouTube clips of the man whose pants are falling down while he is chased by a “very excited” donkey — which is what the workers do at work too, but at least the bosses get to watch over their shoulders.
So really, there is nothing, nothing at all, that can possibly be done to alleviate our state of misery, because transit problems are finely grained, impenetrably nuanced and historically intractable and also because our elected leaders and their staffs are a big bunch of stupidheads.
