I’m not convinced that the new stoplights they’ve put on the entrance ramps onto I-285 will ever be as effective as they supposedly are in other cities.  A few weeks ago they turned them all on one day and it created some massive backups for the exits my coworkers take.  15 minute jaunts to the interstate were taking in excess of an hour all of a sudden and lawlessness abounded at these intersections.  Add confusion, frustration, cluelessness and idiocy and you create the perfect recipe for a traffic disaster.

The lights I’m talking about are halfway down the on-ramp and I guess the idea is to meter traffic flowing onto the interstate.  Here’s my issue with it though – it’s not removing the cars from the road, it’s just displacing them onto sidestreets that can’t handle the additional backups.  It’s turning already-marginal drivers into line cutters, cutter-offers and the standard honking/finger combo.  These back roads simply cannot take these large backups that are happening.  Traffic in Atlanta is bad enough as is.  Why create a scenario where you are doing the proverbial “robbing Peter to pay Paul”?  Did someone in the Georgia legislature owe someone in GDOT a favor who in turn had a buddy who needed to install some excess stoplight inventory?

Not only that, but when you have to stop halfway down an entrance ramp, you lose all your momentum for merging into traffic if it’s not during stop-and-go rush hour.  Maybe that’s not an issue for a sports car but an average car or truck might be merging onto the highway at a lower-than-safe speed.

Can anyone provide me with statistical info that proves this traffic light method is effective?  Does it translate from city to city or is it on a case by case basis?  I have noticed that a lot of these lights have at least been temporarily turned off, which to me is at least a partial admission that the experiment is a failure.  At the very least they could have turned on a few ramps at a time and maybe try to phase the process in.  But the fact remains there are certain streets that are overloaded as is and any additional traffic held on to them has far-reaching implications.  All of a sudden a left turn lane stops dead in its tracks while waiting for each car to get a green light, which in turn blocks oncoming traffic once those left turn signals turn off.