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.
Our own neighborhoods don’t belong to us.
The city ultimately determined the intersection did not meet the required traffic volume for additional stop signs,
It shouldn’t be about how much traffic there is. If people are going too fast and/or there’s a visibility issue and/or there’s danger of kids walking into the street, there needs to be a stop sign because that actually slows people down and makes it safer for everyone involved. Even my carbrain understands that.
The panthers used to get stop lights put in in weeks that localities had been refusing calls from for years. You want to do stuff like this, get organized. And not dancing in frog suits organized, militant, community focused organized with educational programs and childcare for your community.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Wasn’t on a whim. And you totally can. Whether or not it’s a good idea or without consequence is a different story. However, it’s not a stretch to suggest that most people who deal with road infrastructure have dealt with unsafe conditions that could be avoided with restructure. If conditions were unsafe, nothing was being done about it, and the community did something about it to make it safer, power to the people. No one is suggesting a precedent should be set by this, but I would suggest that if we don’t want a repeating pattern, there ought to be a better, more expedient process in place than breaking the law to make this action unnecessary.
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
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.
What type of behavior? Did he do something to endanger the public?
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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.
Yeah, the crosswalk part was harmless, even if he technically wasn’t supposed to do the municipality’s job for them. The rest I’ll take your word for.
The charges include interfering with a traffic control device, grand theft, and vandalism exceeding $400
Actually reading the article, the first fits, but the rest is definitely the cops power tripping, unless he stole the equipment to do it.
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 tracks 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.
Bureaucracy at its finest
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 they 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 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.
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
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.
But it’s literally the same law, if they enforce one they have to enforce the other.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t have a problem with this.
Random people don’t get to decide where stop signs go and do not go.
How about if someone just decided to remove a stop sign.
How about if someone just decided to remove a stop sign.
Are those 2 situations equivalent at all? I can’t think of a situation where adding a stop sign up would make the intersection more dangerous whereas the removal of one would almost certainly make it more dangerous. In your mind is the only way to regulate this to ban both for some reason?
Traffic control is a massive issue that involves numerous factors beyond “danger”.
So yes you can not have random entities making those decisions, There has to be a single governing body.
I agree, just addressing your hypothetical at the end and how that doesn’t follow logically.
Unfortunately, yes, they have to “punish” this.
But it’s still a great publicity stunt that has now gotten the eyes of many people, a new petition on the matter would likely gather a lot more support.
The cops don’t care if the stop sign wasn’t there. They’ll give you a ticket anyway.
While yes, you get out of the ticket if you prove the sign was missing at the time of the infraction.
Edit: Just don’t give them any attitude or they’ll arrest you for resisting arrest.
He’s not a random person, he’s a resident of the neighborhood where he made the change. City officials and this alleged traffic engineer would be considered the “random people” here as they have absolutely zero stake in any of this.
City officials and this alleged traffic engineer would be considered the “random people” here
It’s literally their fucking job dude, what are you talking about.
Why are they an “alleged” traffic engineer? Because you don’t like what they did?
So what if it’s their job when they clearly aren’t doing it and have no connection to the neighborhood? This is a lame appeal to authority fallacy.
Some random official and random engineer checks some bad plans and paperwork and claims “stop signs and crosswalks aren’t needed” so we should just automatically defer to their decision despite the residents who actually live at and use this intersection overwhelmingly claiming the exact opposite? That’s utter nonsense.
I say alleged traffic engineer because they’re claiming they performed a traffic study at this intersection despite residents claiming to see zero evidence of this being performed, but I guess you believe job titles automatically bestow someone with unimpeachable honesty and integrity. A city official made the claim so it must be accurate and true.
car drivers would learn to be more careful and less selfish
I prefer selfish car drivers; they’re predictable. I’m fine with them stopping only because there’s a stop sign. When a car driver decides to be “nice” and gestures for me to go, that’s when I get concerned.
selfish car drivers certainly aren’t predictable as they break laws already inplace
If they’re ignoring the law, then the sign isn’t changing their behavior.
it will, cause there would be more chaos on the road and less predictability, so they would be forced to
And once someone (probably a child) gets hit and dies, the city will say how sorry this tragedy is… will claim they’ll do something, and then do nothing. Because words are cheap. Oh, and they’ll act like this wasn’t avoidable, there was no way to know this kind of thing could happen.
Brb, adding a bike lane to the nearest stroad
Its quota season.
This was in El Segundo? Wonder if they found my wallet.
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.
