Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Traffic Signals Deployed by Morons

Having spent quite some time in dear old Lebanon, it just had to happen. There is no way one can spend one full week here without getting pissed off at something, and this time it's the traffic signals.

Not that few people respect them, that was expected.
Not that they are often offline, they are connected to our famous electricity grid after all.
Not that quite often a police officer will ask you to stop at a green light or drive through at a red light, the government just loves to confuse citizens.

What pisses me off the most is the way they are setup at intersections.
Some smart moron decided to split the traffic on intersections on each direction:
One light for those wishing to go left, and one for those wishing to go straight and right. This way they can have the opposing directions go together, since maybe, maybe, in foreign countries, it was demonstrated that this is more efficient... except we are in LEBANON.
So what ends up happening is the following: I want to go right, so I take the right lane. But 99% of the time, it happens that the guy in front simply wants to go straight (either because he doesn't know or because he is simply an asshole) ... What happens? Either he respects the law and waits for the straight lane green light, or he breaks the law and poses a risk for the opposing direction traffic.
Both cases, it causes disruption in traffic, and eventually chaos. And mainly me waiting at least twice for my traffic lane to go green.

So please, please, if anybody has access to the moron who designed the system and never bothered observing the outcome, please let them know that in Lebanon, it makes more sense to have each direction go alone, with all green on all lanes.

Lebanon News - Aggregated by Google