Bureaucracy at its finest
Much like that park bathroom that was going to cost something like $2M to install in San Francisco. Once the residents and news got ahold of the story, suddenly the bathroom would only cost $100k to install.
As much as this case might have been justified (which we just don’t know without the traffic study), condoning random people fucking with street signage is a terrible idea. There are very good reasons not to randomly change traffic patterns, especially outside of a popular park; fuckcars, but also vigilante traffic engineering is an insanely dangerous game to play. If this brings attention to it and the reevaluate, well done this traffic martyr. But he absolutely should have been arrested for this, if only to prevent a precedent for people who decide to “fix” other traffic issues.
Nah, this was stupid. If he felt obligated to fix something broke, it’s on the county/town, not him. All he did was make the area safer.
With respect, you have no idea if that’s true.
Traffic engineering is an actual science - what he did was extremely well-meaning, but it’s also the pavement equivalent of alternative medicine. Sometimes you’re right, but even if you nail the diagnosis most of the time you’re so ignorant you don’t even understand the potential harm you’re doing in brewing up your own treatment. It is very possible that his traffic revisions have made the area less safe for pedestrians by shifting traffic congestion onto surrounding roads with worse sightlines and higher non-motor vehicle traffic, or simply increasing baseline congestion at this already busy intersection.
It may be a science, but that doesn’t place it in some rarefied air of infallibility, any more than any other science. It’s only ever as good as how it’s applied, and how any science is applied is always subject to human fallibility. Traffic engineering is especially bad in that respect, routinely and as a matter of course being subverted by political considerations, not least by the fundamental choices about who and what matters, and who and what does not matter. It does not deserve much respect as a practice.
But with that said, in this case, even the traffic engineers agreed that a stop sign was an appropriate treatment for this intersection when they rejected it on the basis that the traffic volume wasn’t high enough to warrant installing one. Presumably, if there were more cars, it would be fine. So, yes, we can say confidently that this man made the area safer.
even the traffic engineers agreed that a stop sign was an appropriate treatment for this intersection when they rejected it on the basis that the traffic volume wasn’t high enough to warrant installing one
I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here.
They allegedly did a study to see whether there was enough traffic, a step which requires a certain commitment of resources. If the placement of a stop sign would’ve harmed safety by displacing traffic flow, then they could’ve cited that without spending time on a study. But they didn’t, from which we can conclude that a stop sign is okay there.
Ah, I understand. Thank you.
That’s a decent example of what I’ve been saying - basing a conclusion like that on the wording of an uncited press statement is pretty spurious. There simply may have been more reasons and this was judged the easiest to explain (which happens frequently), and without more information we simply aren’t equipped to make an informed judgement. Much as he wasn’t when he made the initial decision, but admittedly we’re facing far less severe consequences for being wrong.
Nah, this road is a fucking textbook example of a bad neighborhood intersection.
Wide straight road with a hill on one side leads to unsafe driving speeds. Combined with parking at the intersection making visibility low for anyone crossing the intersection (cars, pedestrians, and bikes all included!)
This intersection needs intervention, and a stop sign is a bare minimum solution. Speed bumps and daylighting would also be justified.
We know we build unsafe intersections, we don’t need a traffic study to confirm it, especially if you have a large number of residents with the same complaint.
Sure! And if improvement is warranted hopefully this will bring enough attention that it gets reevaluated. But that all said, even if he was right, being arrested for it is warranted. Hopefully he was right and as a result he’s not punished, but if the only requirement for infrastructure changes was community complaint there would be no speed limits and the bones of traffic engineers would hang from every street light.
You’re punishing him solely to potentially prevent others from doing copying him. Which frankly is insane. Cause lets be honest, he was more than likely right, so punishing him isn’t going to make him regret what he did. He would probably do it again under similar circumstances. If his work is undone by the city, then not only will it make his sacrificd meaningless, it will also likely make him and others want to escalate. If his actions do work, whether or not he is punished, it serves as proof that his strategy works, and if people are desperate enough they will copy him. Then lastly the people who want to fuck with traffic stuff just for the fun of it are not going to be the kinds of people deterred by the possibility of getting arrested.
Punishing him not only won’t stop shit, it further proves him right. Making an example of him is punishing a man for doing the right thing when the city wouldn’t and is unproductive and wrong. The city shoulda just put the stop sign in and none of this would have been an issue.
No it’s not the same.
People taking down speed limits signs cause they want to go faster does not warrant the same response as people complaining that an intersection is unsafe and trying to improve it, and only because the city is basically ignoring them.
It is the same though, it goes both ways
But it’s literally the same law, if they enforce one they have to enforce the other.
It’s exactly the same - someone is changing the signage without knowing what they’re doing. I don’t think he should be harshly punished in this case, especially if he’s right, but this also isn’t at all different from someone fucking with the speed limit signs because they feel they know best. That person may also be right - that doesn’t mean they should be able to make those changes.
imo if you are going to start changing how the road is, start blocking it or start damaging the road to force a speedbump or hole. It’s a lot cheaper than spending 1000$ on a sign they can easily just take down, a lot faster and less likely to get caught in the act.
That seems counterproductive because it just antagonizes people. His method blends in with the rest of the road and will likely gain much better compliance from drivers.
I agree but, thats sort of the point. The first alternative is a lot of money that takes a bunch of time to setup, just for the city to very cheaply and quickly reverse it. They had already /tried/ that approach and the city said no, doing it themselves was just a bad plan to begin with.
The city at the moment is out maybe 20 minutes to take the sign down, and then can go back to sticking their head in the sand.
A damaged road? can take weeks to months to fix, and requires a dedicated crew and equipment, all while forcing vehicles to slow down due to it, while using tools that are likely just laying about the garage. Don’t take me wrong, both methods are super illegal, but, one is morally bad, cheap and hard to fix, where one is morally good, expensive, time consuming and easily fixed.
Our local playground has no traffic signs (aside from a playground sign) and a very faded crosswalk, but everyone knows to slow way down before reaching it because if they don’t the potholes(winter kills the roads) will make them regret it.
The town “fixes” it every few years or so.
I just think this guy’s approach is king because he put in a ton of time and effort to do it right with expensive materials, has a very sympathetic cause, and has all of the public and media on his side with the city looking like unreasonable bad guys. Another example of this is the guy who updated a freeway sign (also in CA) to better show the upcoming split and was never caught. He waited until the statute of limitations ran out and published the story of himself doing it online
When you start tearing up the road that you and your neighbors use daily, people are going to turn on you and make you a pariah which not only hurts yourself but also your cause. I bet you this man’s charges get dropped and the city will cave to get some good PR with very little effort.
Now for places with a shit ton of potholes and bad roads, I think spray painting dicks or other vulgar things on them is very effective vandalism because the examples out there show that the city/county will be quick to correct the issue and everyone has a laugh about it.
Yea i get what you mean. Also I know what case you are talking about I think, That was the case where they never even noticed he did it until he said something right? I saw a youtube video on that a year or two ago.
That’s a hard line to walk. Being so afraid your kid will get hit by a car that you do something that could get you sent to prison, where you certainly won’t be able to do anything for said kid.
The city officials need to be the ones facing consequences for this, not him.
Courts and juries are somewhat good at identifying bureaucratic incompetence. Prison is unlikely, but the fact he will have to appear in court likely a few times to resolve this is still not great.
He will probably get a fine at the end of the day
One can hope.
As he should. Probably an unpopular take, but even if this guy was right this time, we shouldn’t be accepting this type of behavior.
“Spider-Man is a menace!” -you, apparently.
What type of behavior? Did he do something to endanger the public?
Good. (Downvote me all you want)
If you let everyone design their local traffic flow it will be impossible to go anywhere. That’s worse than everyone deciding if they want low-income housing or a safe injection site in their neighborhood.
The intersection was already a 2-way stop and, given the street topology and level of service, changing it to an all-way stop is benign.
The concern I have is that part of the charges include painting the crosswalk where one already exists. That’s not “design[ing] their local traffic flow,” but following up with expected public works. Granted he painted a ladder design rather than a standard continental pattern, but you should probably just shut the fuck up in the future.
A car-brained, embarrassing comment.
The safety of children is more important than the speed you’re able to drive to Krispy Kreme Donuts. If the government doesn’t address it, the people will. You barking about traffic flow is irrelevant and I do not care.
Yeah, people also don’t want high-speed rail going past their house or whatever.
If the government doesn’t address it, the people will.
Good luck with that. Most people like cars a lot more than I do.
Good! Filthy criminal! Lock 'm up!
/s
Its quota season.
Weird that in one photo the stop marking is in negative, and the next photo the stop marking is white?
Seems to me like the photos aren’t trustworthy. Which again cast doubt on the whole story.I think the one photo is showing a stencil taped down and coned off prior to applying the white paint.
Yes you are probably right, weird that they didn’t write that in the text.
Weird that in one photo the stop marking is in negative, and the next photo the stop marking is white?
The first photo is of the stencil, the second is from after it’s been painted.
The city ultimately determined the intersection did not meet the required traffic volume for additional stop signs
For the record, this is 100% a lie. Every single warrant document (list of criteria) used by an engineer will have two magic words written at the bottom of the list:
“Engineering judgement.”
That means there is no such thing as a “required traffic volume” for a stop sign or any other kind of signal or marking. If the engineer, in his professional judgement, agrees that one is warranted, it’s warranted.
Engineers who hide behind things like warrants, pretending their hands are tied by them, are cowards and aren’t doing their jobs properly.
The city engineer who refused to approve the stop sign didn’t want to approve it because he cared more about drivers’ convenience than he did children’s safety, but was too chickenshit to tell it to the dad’s face.
There is usually some guidance, although the regulations are usually written with more wiggle room than structural standards because of varying site conditions.
However, the hill causing an increase to the speed of the car and that the area has a known pedestrian draw to it would tip the scales more towards installing a stop sign.
If 50 people sign a petition, you don’t need to do a study. Just put in the fucking stop sign.
Even if the vehicle traffic didn’t meet some imaginary quota, that says nothing of the pedestrian traffic. Just another signal of our car-centric society.
That’s typically one of the warrants. In addition to vehicle, bicycle, and pedestrian volumes, other warrants include things like vehicle approach speed, sight distance, and crash statistics.
There are stop signs in the middle of nowhere Ohio, where there’s literally a few cars on the road a day. I don’t see how volume should come into play when you’re next to a playground.
Yeah here in WI too. Like on 55mph state highways in the literal middle of nowhere, as in the intersection is corn fields on every quadrant.
Its weird, but of course I stop. Im only ever stopping for the corn, but I aint trying to have some cop come flying out of the corn and tear my ass up either lol
That Park’s revenue is negative. Sir, don’t you see? The shareholders!
Our own neighborhoods don’t belong to us.
Brb, adding a bike lane to the nearest stroad
Just install these instead:
hey that’s cheating. that was how i crossed busy streets when i was walking home from undergrad.
i had a bright neon painted metal water bottle. I would raise it and make eye contact. just like that. like, this is mine, but it can be yours. you don’t know if it weighs an ounce or 5 pounds. stops traffic remarkably well, especially considering the law and the sign everyone ignored right above my head said “stop for pedestrians”.
yes, i did have a death wish you don’t need to ask. living in utah does that to you when you’ve seen life on the outside.
Is Utah that bad? It’s at the top of so many lists. I could imagine the people being the biggest problem, though.
it was, yeah.
there is incentive to game those lists. they are… what is the word… tourism? advertisement? other places don’t have as much riding on gaming those lists as utah does. it’s not their religion that looks bad when it’s not #1.
Huh, always weird when I see local news on my Lemmy feed.
FYI, South Bay is especially car brained, even my LA. We have a major refinery, some car manufacturer HQs, and I’m pretty sure more mechanics per capita than most of Cali. Long history with the automotive industry going back to the founding of a lot of these little cities.
It’s a shame, too. The beach cities are lovely places to walk and somehow have terrible biking and public transportation infrastructure. The people there can be a bit entitled, though (and it’s it just me or did this guy do it right outside his fucking home? Lol). But I don’t know a solution, it’s practically every other day someone is mowed down 'round here by a muscle car, and the areas East of El Segundo have a lot more waking families since we can’t afford cars.
A little hope, though. I saw they mentioned the Sawtelle area too. I used to live there, and not only did they 180 on that case, Stoner Park is now surrounded by mini roundabouts. So change does happen after this type of thing, and their jurisdiction is LA itself, not a smaller city in a city.
Ok let’s change the headline up a bit: California father arrested after erasing crosswalk paint and taking down stop signs from near the children’s park.
That is not what the article describes at all.
A city representative said officials reviewed the intersection after receiving concerns from Brandlin and determined it did not meet the requirements for a four-way stop but added pedestrian striping to improve safety.
Brandlin spent about $1,000 of his own money on commercial-grade materials, including 30-inch reflective stop signs matching the other ones on the street. He began installing them himself to replace the yellow posted crosswalk signs on the intersection in the early morning of March 14, according to the El Segundo Police Department.
Police arrested him around 1:30 a.m. while he worked on the second direction of traffic. Brandlin said the arrest was excessive, saying he was cited with multiple charges, including felonies.
People should not be misusing public property in contravention of the law.
What good does changing the headline do?
OG says repaints
New one would say essentially removed paint.
Anarchism meets the state.
Direct action and taking charge of the change you want to see is great, states fucking things up because they’re not the ones in power is pathetic.
Yeah what could possibly go wrong if we just let every Tom, Dick and Harry with no knowledge or experience in any of this, to just put up traffic signs anywhere they want?
Surely that goes both ways right? There’s a stop sign by my house that I don’t like, so I’m going to just remove it. Fuck the state, right?
There’s a difference between lone individuals tearing out stop signs and a neighborhood collectively deciding to install one near a park.
Yeah, it’s called a city council
Real “If we let gay people get married, soon people will be marrying their hamsters” energy
It’s really not that at all, but go off
It really is. Slippery slope fallacy. Letting one neighborhood collectively decide to make an intersection by a park safer for children to cross is not the same as letting all people make their own decisions regarding signs and intersections. We are capable of handling individual situations as context-sensitive instead of assuming universal application is the only option.
It’s not slippery slope, it’s literally the same law. You can’t just add or remove signs on a whim.
