Computer Failure Causes Gridlock In MD County 483
Uncle Rummy writes "A central traffic control computer in Montgomery County, Maryland failed early Wednesday morning, leading to widespread gridlock across the entire county. The computer, which dates to the 1970s, is the single point of unified control for all traffic signals in the county, which comprises a number of major Washington DC-area suburban communities. When the system failed, it caused all signals to default to stand-alone operation, rather than the highly-tuned synchronization that usually serves to facilitate traffic flow during rush hours. The resulting chaos is a yet another stark reminder of how much modern civilization relies on behind-the-scenes automation to deliver and control basic services and infrastructure. The system remains down Thursday, with no ETA in sight."
I've seen this movie as well... (Score:5, Funny)
I smell foul play...
Quick, someone get Bruce Willis!
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The washington metro's computers did crash yesterday also. So call him quick!
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Re:I've seen this movie as well... (Score:5, Funny)
Bringing in Bruce Willis is *never* a bad idea. Need an asteroid destroyed in an affront to basic science? Call Willis. Need to remove an East German terrorist that can't speak proper German? Willis. Need someone to have sex with a hot, orange haired diety? Willis. Need Chuck Norris' ass kicked? Willis. Cancer cure? Willis. Making a Jaws Sequel? Have Bruce Willis play the shark.
Re:I've seen this movie as well... (Score:5, Funny)
Whoa there, no need for Willis for that one. I'll do it. And if she objects, tell her the next choice is Shatner.
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And if she objects, tell her the next choice is Shatner.
Spock! She... knows... it's a multipass!
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I have seen Die Hard 4, but I really wish I could un-see it. A terrible film, with a terrible plot, terrible portrayal of computer systems (even worse than the usual hollywood fair, and not even lampooned BPS-style), and it didn't even have decent enough mindless action to compensate.
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You must have seen the theatrical release. It was indeed bad, the unrated version was pure entertainment. It was almost all mindless action and a lot of good laughs, which were absent in the rated version ("Yeah, your girlfiiend's at the bottom of an elevator shaft with an SUV rammed up her ass"). And what movie ever gets anything at all right?
BTW, what's BPS? I looked it up in wikipedia and nothing seems to fit.
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A terrible film, with a terrible plot, terrible portrayal of computer systems
Oh c'mon, it's not that bad. It's entirely believable that one would be able to download The Accumulated Wealth Of The World into a removable hard drive and abscond with apparently the only copy of it.
How obscure? (Score:2)
Wooo Fire Sale!!
remind of a Cult of The Dead Cow tfile (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the single computer, i bet a coke no one knows the root password, the system administrator is long gone and the programmers are very long gone. I bet the staff tried to power cycle it thinking it was just like a PC and now they've made the problem 3x worse.
All-green probably an urban legend (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of those boxes have a "conflicting green" detector circuit that automatically puts the signal in "safe mode" when it detects two conflicting green lights.
On simpler systems, "safe mode" is all-way flashing red lights.
I guess if you knew what wires to mess with you could disable this safety feature.
Physical access is root access.
Re:All-green probably an urban legend (Score:4, Funny)
After hurricane Ike blew through Houston, I ended up parking at a light that was stuck, showing green for traffic in one direction only for at least 15 minutes.
Every time someone was brave enough to try to run the red light, someone else would drive through the green light and spook everyone. Eventually I turned right, U-turned, and turned right again.
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That's what's supposed to happen. I have anecdotal non-proof from several years ago that that may not be universal, though. In Renton, WA, just west of the Sunset Blvd intersection, Bronson Way crosses a couple railroad tracks (which recently were only used for the Spirit of Washington dinner train and have now been torn up completely in Bellevue). Wh
I do! (Score:3, Funny)
it's "password"!
This is government, you know.
Re:I do! (Score:5, Funny)
Silly billy! The system is now protected by a new set of rules. You have to have upper and lowercase, a special character, and a number.
The password is now: P@ssw0rd
See? The system is now completely secure!
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A machine that old? The password is bound to be: sex, love, secret or god =)
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It's actually most likely VMS, and it's most likely going to require them to find whoever they laid off in order to outsource their 'legacy' system.
1970's computer (Score:2)
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Old systems stick around because they work. City-wide traffic systems are very complicated affairs. Getting rid of a 40 year old system also means trashing 40 years of hard lessons.
NBU (Score:2, Funny)
Just throwing that out there.
When the system fails, shut the lights off. (Score:2)
No lights is better than badly times lights.
Re:When the system fails, shut the lights off. (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, sure, the law states that when an intersection has traffic lights, and the lights are out, it's an all-way stop. But in practice, I rarely see other drivers actually give a fuck that they are supposed to stop.
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I have seen accidents at lightly trafficked intersections when the light was completely out... I don't want to imagine the apocalypse of a couple hundred all going out in a well populated area; it would turn into Mad Max in a matter of hours.
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Re:When the system fails, shut the lights off. (Score:5, Funny)
When I lived in Kentucky, we had an ice storm that knocked out power in Lexington for the better part of a week. The loss of traffic lights meant every intersection was supposed to turn into a 4-way stop. Which meant that every car came to a halt (in theory) at every intersection for a second or two. My 8-mile 15-minute drive to work turned into 3 hours one morning. I finally found a parking lot, parked my car there, and walked the remaining 3 miles. It was faster. Seriously - I recognized a guy 2 cars ahead of me and he arrived at work 1/2 hour after I did.
The reality was that people were assuming that dark lights meant that either (a) it was a 4-way stop, (b) people on the "larger/main" road had right-of-way, (c) I have no idea so I'm going to creep through, or (d) screw it, y'all, I've got the big fukkin truck - get outta my way.
On the third day, they deployed every police officer, meter reader, and anyone else with a pulse who was trainable to direct traffic. Of course, this meant that every bad driver in Lexington knew that all bets were off in terms of speed limits, right-of-way, and other moving violations during those times. Ever read "Lord of the Flies"? Yeah, it was like that. With cars.
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In my experience, when the lights are out, a bunch of people will go through the intersection and then somebody will stop, at which point a bunch of people will go from the perpendicular direction. It works out quite well.
There is one light that I pass through on my commute that goes out for an afternoon a few times a year. On those days, traffic improves noticeably as people are better able to judge which direction is more backed up at that particular moment than a computer is.
The computers only have a few
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When a traffic signal in Toronto loses contact with the computer, it goes to flashing 4-way red, to remind people it's an all-way-stop now. They only go to "no signal" if there's a power failure. (In which case, they're still all-way-stop but despite the radio saying so every time there's a power failure, 70% of drivers just blow through a dark traffic light at speed.)
I think all-way-stop on multilane roads are MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH worse than untimed lights. People have no idea how to deal with multilane
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People have no idea how to deal with multilane roads that have a stop sign; almost no-one will let a left turn through, all sorts of problems like that.
Maybe you should teach them this and test it on Drivers License exam instead of usual round the block with automatic transmission then, eh?
Have a taste of living in Los Angeles! (Score:5, Funny)
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But the joke is that LA traffic lights aren't centrally coordinated. They may actually be, but it sure as hell doesn't seem like it. After all, this is the city that's spending millions of dollars to install protected left-turn lights.
LA traffic instructions:
Green light: wait for the intersection to clear.
Yellow: GO GO GO!!!!
Red: Make a left.
From the 1980s (Score:5, Informative)
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Modernization of the Montgomery County Traffic Signal System [baltometro.org]
Data General, you say? Then this seems appropriate (Score:3, Funny)
In fact when I've a floppy of a maximum diameter,
When I can call a subroutine of infinite parameter,
When I can point to registers and keep their current map around,
And when I can prevent the need for mystifying wraparound,
When I can update record blocks with minimum of suffering,
And when I can afford to use a hundred K for buffering,
When I've performed a matrix sort and tested the addition rate,
You'll marvel at the speed of my asynchronous transmission rate.
Though all my better programs that self-reference
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Re:From the 1980s (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought about that too. All those press references to "1970s" and "Carter-era". But these are the same geniuses in the Fourth Estate who called the thing a "mainframe", so their ignorance is manifest.
I apply the BS test here. If anyone tells me they have a Nova (even a late-model Nova 4) controlling all the traffic lights of an entire metropolitan county adjacent to the District of Columbia, will I cry shenanigans? In this case, yes. I've worked with Novas, PDP-11s, and Perkin-Elmer 16-bit minis. I'm familiar with their capabilities. You would have to be coder of absolute godly skill to write the realtime control software to safely manage dozens (scores? hundreds?) of street lights in only 64Kbytes of core (or RAM, whatever).
Whereas the most primitive Eclipse would have ample horsepower to do the trick.
So I still say Eclipse. Certainly, the comparative newness of the Eclipse over the Nova doesn't help the parts situation at all, because they're both dead as a doornail, support-wise. EMC end-of-lifed [dg.com] the last and greatest Data General line, AViiON, nearly a year ago.
MontCo $$ (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who aren't familiar with Montgomery County, MD. It is one of, if not the richest counties in the nation. I find it amazing that even in a county like this, the public infrastructure is crumbling.
They had a massive water main break earlier this year that made the national news.
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No one fixes infrastructure until it's broken. That's pretty standard everywhere.
Los Angeles has had an increase in water main breaks also. They fix the spot as they break. If I remember their numbers, they expect about 400 to 700 main breaks per year.
Who cares about the old mini/mainframe running the traffic lights. If it's run since the 70's or 80's, it'll run forever. I always love that intelligence. I like to laugh about it more when it fails too. :)
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Well, not since the tax-cut/reduce-government fanatics came into power.
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This is Montgomery County, Maryland, we're talking about -- tax-cut/reduce-government fanatics NEVER come into power here.
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No one fixes infrastructure until it's broken. That's pretty standard everywhere.
Sometimes not even after it's broken. Or more commonly, when it's broken, there's a half-assed temporary repair that becomes the permanent repair until it breaks again.
The biggest reason for doing this is short-term-ism: If a politician manages to save money now, it doesn't matter to him that somebody else 10 years down the line will have to spend far more money to clean up the mess after the system failed. So each administration (at any level: state, county, and municipal governments are far from immune to
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Why do you find it amazing? Even in a rich county there's not much money left over for good infrastructure after all the mandatory spending on bribe and kickback entitlements.
Job opening in MD... (Score:3, Funny)
This is reassuring... (Score:2)
The upside in this is that the lights still work when the controller is down. They don't go flashing red, stay red, turn off or something worse.
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Right. A failure of this system is not an issue of safety, just of horrible, horrible inconvenience.
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Right. A failure of this system is not an issue of safety, just of horrible, horrible inconvenience.
You obviously don't live in this area. When anything like this happens, road rage incidents skyrocket. Maryland has some of the worst drivers I've ever seen. And Maryland doesn't require that drivers use turn signals. I hate driving through there, especially on the highways. The posted speed limit is 55, but I get about 20% of the drivers blowing by me at over 80. Montgomery and Prince George's County are the worst of the bunch.
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Re:This is reassuring... (Score:5, Interesting)
IANATE (I Am Not A Traffic Engineer), but I've had the opportunity to talk to some over the years. From what I recall of those conversations, most, if not all, traffic signals are failsafe. They cannot have colliding greens, and they won't generally just turn off. Even in the event of a power failure, they're suppose to stay up on batteries for a while.
I have seen their failsafe behavior fail though. I was once driving on a dark foggy night. Visibility was very very poor. I was staying in my lane, but I couldn't see much else. I had a long drive in a rural area, and I was coming into an urban area. I expected to see street lights and traffic lights, but there were none. As I was driving, another car shot across the road just ahead of me, missing me by just a few feet. He didn't see the traffic light that wasn't working either. I called the police, so they could station an officer there. Their response was "Are you crazy? No one can see at that intersection. He'll get hit." Hmmm, good logic. At least no one got killed there that night.
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I blame Dan Snyder (Score:2, Funny)
Fire him.
70s computer (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn! 70s? Talk about Return on Investment.
The WashPost, in another article touts Fragile Technology.
I reach for my 70's era calculator and estimate the operational life of 34 years for this system. Some Fragility. Who or what at the Post has been there that long.
Wonder if its some ancient PDP version or an small IBM mainframe. The article is scarce on details. Parts for either are getting hard to find except in the scrap market.
Still you have to wonder why it wasn't ported to some other platform if nothing else as an exercise in disaster preparedness. Any commodity computer could do the job.
There is a lot of stuff like this still in service. I saw a PDP 8 monitoring turbines in a hydro Power station, and asked about where they get that fixed. The reply was it never broke down, but they had stockpiled 6 replacements, tested each yearly, just because they realized how old it was. Nobody knows exactly what it does anymore.
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I once visited a factory for cattle feed where all silos were controlled by an ancient PDP computer. This was a few years ago. When I asked why it was not replaced by a more modern machine the answer was that all timings for the diverse outlets of the silos (and thus the mixture of the products) were so precise that it would be nearly impossible to reproduce on another platform, taking into account things like the speed of commands executed in programming languages, processing times of cpu etc.
I think it is
Re:70s computer (Score:5, Informative)
You misunderstand. They have reliable equipment, and they are installing more of it. So they are installing more reliable equipment.
ObQuote (Score:2)
"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
Wait... Modern? Basic? (Score:2)
Sane default (Score:2)
Here's a piece about traffic lights optimized for furry bicyclists... http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/default-to-green.html [blogspot.com]
Where? (Score:3, Funny)
I can tell you where it is. Right there on layer 4. Does that help? Then try layer 8.
Blame it on Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
Shouldn't be too much of a problem... (Score:2)
...you can always call work and say you'll be late. Unless you've got T-Mobile.
Just Skynet Running Some Tests (Score:4, Funny)
The resulting chaos is a yet another stark reminder of how much modern civilization relies on behind-the-scenes automation to deliver and control basic services and infrastructure.
Just Skynet trying to figure out how to bunch up targets when it seizes control of our Predator and Reaper UAV's.
And if they had been using roundabouts... (Score:5, Interesting)
... to mediate traffic instead of traffic signals, they wouldn't have needed the aging old single-point-of-failure computer in the first place, because roundabouts (a) require no computers, (b) require no electronics at all, (c) require no electricity, and (d) don't require maintenance. What's more, since they allow motorists to preserve some momentum in all but the most congested traffic, gas consumption from forced arbitrary deceleration and acceleration is reduced. The only intelligence they require isn't of the artificial sort at all, only a smidgen of it from the motorists using them. They are un-powered and self-adjusting to traffic flow.
Would anyone like to take a stab at how much energy and man-hours is expended on the traffic signal network in the United States every year?
Re:And if they had been using roundabouts... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a UK resident and driver in the true home of the roundabout, I wish to tell you that roundabouts are not a panacea.
Roundabouts work best for light to moderate traffic, where all 4 directions and all movements (left turn, right turn etc) are fairly equal in demand. For heavy traffic, they very quickly congest as traffic builds on the roundabout and blocks all entry. Indeed, round here most busy/large roundabouts have traffic lights on them as well, with varying degrees of success.
As for "gas consumption from forced arbitrary deceleration and acceleration is reduced" - I strongly disagree. Here roundabouts are used as a form of 'traffic calming', ie a deliberate obstacle to slow traffic. With a traffic light its a 50/50 chance between stopping completely and carrying on at cruising speed. With roundabouts there is always a decelerate/accelerate cycle, which depending on the design of the junction can be quite severe. In Birmingham (UK) and elsewhere. there was even a recent fad among local traffic engineers to plant high vegetation on the sightlines for approaching traffic to force all vehicles entering the roundabout to slow to below 5mph to be able to see traffic on the junction. On some examples here you have maybe 3 ft before the roundabout itself where you can see oncoming vehicles.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that roundabouts are rubbish and traffic lights are good, but theres different solutions to different problems. Replacing non-synchronised traffic lights with roundabouts in a situation with very heavy traffic would have a very much worse result.
Re:And if they had been using roundabouts... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was very sceptical when the state said they were planning to replace the stop light with a traffic circle. But, the traffic circle has been able to handle the traffic much more smoothly than the stoplight did. I rarely need to wait more than a few seconds to get through the traffic circle, even during rush hour. I also usually do not need to make a complete stop, which saves gas and reduces the wear on my clutch.
As you mentioned, no electricity, computers or electronics are needed. It keeps working just fine, whenever the power occasionally goes off after a summer thunderstorm, for a few minutes.
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I've seen some places in the US, where the green light is blue. I still haven't figured that one out, but I tend to go for the blue light, and stop for the pink one.
Re:Report from the field: "Drivers very confused" (Score:4, Informative)
Green lights are often blue to accommodate reg/green color blindness.
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Not necessary. My dad is color blind, and as long as the traffic engineers aren't stupid enough to install the lights upside down there's no problem -- top light means stop, bottom light means go.
He did get a ticket in Arizona once because the light was installed upside down.
He has a far greater problem with stop signs, and still curses them for changing the color from yellow to red back when I was a kid. If there's foliage behind the stop sign the sign's virtually invisible to a color blind man.
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I have traveled extensively inside the USA and have never seen one such occurence. Tell me, does it appear blue to color blind people only?
The red light has a nontrivial amount of yellow and the green light a nontrivial amount of blue, for the convenience of the red-blue color blind (the commonest type of color-blindness).
For people with "normal" color vision (the commonest form of color vision, that is - there are a considerable number of rarer color vision variants), it's a lot easier to see the blue in t
Re:Report from the field: "Drivers very confused" (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe you haven't noticed the pattern. If lights are aligned vertically, the red light is ALWAYS on top and the green one ALWAYS on the bottom. If they're aligned horizontally, the red light is ALWAYS on the left. The arrangement is always the same, regardless of where the traffic light is exactly located.
Re:Report from the field: "Drivers very confused" (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for one light in Buffalo, NY.
The folklore is that the Irish workmen thought that green should always be on the top.
The light has been reaplced, IIRC, several times, but remains the only inverted traffic light in the US.
Inverted traffic light - actually Syracuse, NY (Score:5, Informative)
Being from Buffalo I was curious that I'd never heard of that - turns out it's actually in Syracuse, which is two cities east of Buffalo (Rochester in between) and about a two and a half hour drive :)
Here's some info [roadsideamerica.com],
And here's a photo [flickr.com].
Re:Report from the field: "Drivers very confused" (Score:5, Funny)
That's why in my town we have Braille traffic lights.
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Off-topic, I lived in a city in the 1980s where some traffic lights were still on the side of the street instead of overhead. So many out of towners were running reds and wrecking the city had to put in the overheads.
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Well, you're semi-correct. The pink light is actually yellow or amber. We call it pink because pink is almost red.
Re:Report from the field: "Drivers very confused" (Score:5, Funny)
The blue is from appraching the light too fast. You're aproximately going 20% the speed of light. SLOW DOWN.
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That's actually a bumper sticker I've seen around DC (Goddard Space Flight Center is in a suburb):
On a red field:
"If this sticker is blue, slow down!"
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"The blue is from appraching the light too fast. You're aproximately going 20% the speed of light. SLOW DOWN"
If you're doing .2c then its going to take you months to slow down (at any acceleration the human body can take)
Re:Report from the field: "Drivers very confused" (Score:5, Funny)
Let's just see you try that line on the police.
"I would have slowed down, officer, but it would have either taken too long or crushed me, so I didn't bother."
Re:Where's a traffic cop when you need one? (Score:5, Funny)
That wouldn't make it any better.
I haven't read the article, but if the summary correctly reflects the situation, the traffic lights are all working - they're just working independently, so rather than being in sync so the main flow of traffic never has to stop (or stops less) they're all just doing their own thing.
Re:Where's a traffic cop when you need one? (Score:5, Funny)
if the summary correctly reflects the situation
Please mod parent funny.
Re:Where's a traffic cop when you need one? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Where's a traffic cop when you need one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't matter. The traffic lights were working fine, the problem was there was no central system that could take a larger view of traffic and sense that turning a light green a block away could prevent a gridlock issue at a specific intersection. Intelligent traffic control takes traffic that is approaching a heavily congested area and intentionally slows it down, while freeing up cars to LEAVE congested areas more quickly. They help prevent gridlock by making sure that once a specific light turns green you can actually drive through the intersection, and turns the light red BEFORE cars get caught in the middle of an intersection.
You see this kind of design a lot in well-designed roads in smaller towns. Busy towns will tend to have lots of stop signs coming in to town, but try to reduce stop signs when leaving town. The idea is to keep inbound traffic from filling the town faster than departing cars can leave by making sure cars that are leaving can do so as quickly as possible, while cars wanting to come in will be intentionally slowed down.
A meter maid has no more information about traffic flow at adjacent intersections than an autonomous single light would.
Re:Where's a traffic cop when you need one? (Score:5, Funny)
A meter maid has no more information about traffic flow at adjacent intersections than an autonomous single light would.
Then how about a Beowulf cluster of meter maids? (with walkie talkies of course)
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Hmm...around here it means HIT THE GAS, otherwise you're gonna have to stop soon!!
Re:I live there (Score:5, Informative)
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I live in downtown Silver Spring. I commute from Columbia. It's usually a 30 minute drive, but last night took me an hour and a half. The worst part was when I crossed Georgia Ave a block from my home, right by the DC border. That last block took me 20 minutes.
I was trying to figure out what was up with the traffic. I didn't see any accidents or emergency vehicles, and the traffic reports I heard just said that traffic on Georgia was slow. Didn't hear anything about the control system until today.
Re:I live there (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to break out the bicycle. Or walk it, for that matter.
6 miles should take about an hour and a half at a decent walking pace, or about 45 minutes at a fairly leisurely cycling pace, and a week or so of it and your new sculpted bod will drive the ladies wild. :)
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The shoppers also make Rockville Pike a particularly frustrating road to travel on weekends this time of year. Given that the control system will not be repaired until at least the middle of next week [washingtonpost.com], this weekend is probably going to make for some horrendous driving in that area.
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I noticed it yesterday, I was cursing whoever changed the timing on one of the lights as it was causing a considerable backup. Then I read this.
I wouldn't call it gridlock though either. Just slightly worse than usual
It depends on your route also, if you are crossing the main routes rather than going on them it might even make your journey quicker.
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In any case, my coworkers sure noticed. Some of them said that their commute yesterday went from 30 minutes to 3 hours. Similarly getting
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(Sorely needed feature: edit a post)
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Supposed to be.
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Fairfax County is in cahoots with the oil companies to make us burn more gas waiting for the lights to turn green. They also work for brake pad manufacturers, who make a fortune from people who have to slam on the brakes from 55 mph while driving on the Fairfax County Parkway. I hate driving through there at any time, but it's worse during rush hour since every moron is out driving and won't maintain the speed limit.
Re: Are you kidding? (Score:3, Insightful)
We have a few roundabouts. Believe it or not, frequently every entrance has a stop sign instead of a yield sign. Kinda defeats the purpo