Red Asphalt Lite - Hahn's Goody-goody Good-Driving Campaign
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The best traffic-control device ever devised is the speed bump - particularly the tall, nasty ones in certain parts of Santa Monica.
Nothing slows you down quicker than the screech of a six-inch-high mound of hardened asphalt ripping off your oil pan. But my favorite speed-killer was the joke sign posted in a residential neighborhood in Simi Valley not long ago - official-looking black block letters on a big yellow diamond. It said - and this is a direct quote: "SLOW THE #@*% DOWN!"
Now comes Jim Hahn's much-bannered Watch the Road campaign - an 18-month excursion into feel-good finger-wagging that I guarantee will do absolutely nothing to rid L.A.'s freeways and streets of smashed fenders and spilled blood. Here's why:
People drive like complete idiots in Los Angeles. It's the culture.
Boston drivers are antagonistic. New York drivers are aggressive speeders. Beijing drivers are mellow beyond belief. L.A. drivers are self-involved flakes.
Hahn and company have about as much chance of cutting the accident rate with PR campaigns as they do disbanding the Bloods and the Crips by banning red and blue handkerchiefs.
No trip is so important that you can't squeeze in at least three cellphone calls, 15 glances at the cute driver in the next lane and two split-second high-speed swerves from the number 1 lane to the exit you almost missed while simultaneously flipping off the eight drivers you nearly murdered in the process.
With so much of your wheel time taken up with vital schmoozing, eating, jotting down million-dollar screenplay ideas and beating the crap out of your dashboard drumkit, driving's just an irritating distraction.
And never mind the oncoming semi - if you're the third driver stacked up in a left turn lane, you get to make the turn even if the light was red 20 seconds before you crept into the intersection.
True story - a woman's Vette plunged over the side on an Orange County road about four years ago, and when they pulled her body from the wreck, they found her eyes half-made-up, the mascara brush clutched in her dead hand.
So why do Hahn, Zev Yaroslavsky and a loose public-private coalition of do-gooders called Operation Traffix think they'll be able to stop speed freaks in Cobras and Modenas from fishtailing all over western Sunset Boulevard with helpful slogans like "Watch the Road!" and "Slow Down, Your Family is Waiting for You?" I mean, hooray for them, but why bother? Let's take a look at the accident stats in November, 2005 and see if anything's different. If even one less kid is dead than expected, I'll eat this website.
One more note - There's a sick irony to their choice of those ubiquitous and distracting lightpole banners as one medium for their message. My first reaction was to take my eyes off the car in front of me to squint upward long enought so I could read the ridiculously tiny print so I could catch the URL for WatchTheRoad.org. Then I jotted it down.
Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, May 31, 2004 - 09:01 PM
The best traffic-control device ever devised is the speed bump - particularly the tall, nasty ones in certain parts of Santa Monica.
