In the last couple weeks, two new traffic lights have gone up along my route to work. The first went up at the intersection of 169 and 68. It used to be, in the morning, traffic from 169 coming to 68 was backed up 10 or 12 cars when I would go past there in the morning. Now it’s backed up 20 or 30 cars in all three directions in the morning, and backed up at least a half mile southbound after work.

The second light is at where Grassy Creek crosses Man O’ War. Up until now, it would take perhaps as much as 2 or 3 minutes to get across Man O’ War in the morning, and there would occasionally be 2 or 3 cars waiting. Now, with the new light, it takes about 10 minutes to get across Man O’ War, and there were 7 cars backed up waiting for the light to change this morning.

How is this progress?

Apparently the traffic engineers around here never studied queueing theory.