Or you could go the more subtle route, and acquire key positions in the city's traffic team and ensure the roads are never flowing as well as they could be.
Seattle's traffic engineers already ensure crummy flow. Just watch how the traffic lights change for proof. The lights change without regard for the traffic at the moment.
The city finds the funds to mount cameras on most of the lights and license plate recognizers, etc., but cannot seem to use the cameras to simply look at the traffic and calculate when to change the lights for max flow.
Things could be a lot better without building or expanding any new roads.
Agreed. In many instances, I have sat at a light, unable to move forward because the street ahead is full, for a full three light periods.
It would necessarily have been better to have my light be red the entire time and allow the perpendicular street to have more flow. Instead, even though absolutely no cars were moving, the light happily stayed green for 30 seconds each period.
Not only do the lights not react to the actual flow of traffic, but the dumb-timers they are on are poorly timed. One would expect, in a well-designed system, each light should turn green in a sequence defined by the speed limit and the distance between lights, so that in a main artery, large batches of cars can progress forward several blocks at a time each period, increasing throughput.
Instead, even when I drive in the middle of the night along 3rd (a main north-south street downtown), going exactly the speed limit, I hit red and green lights more or less at random. I'll sit at a red one and watch the next light turn green, and by the time my light turns green and I get there, the next is already red.
