Kill the signs please

It seems that CalTrans is thinking about inflicting their new program to make our freeway system as ineffective as possible here in Ventura County. Toss my hat into the ring with our mayor:

Thousand Oaks Mayor Claudia Bill-de la Pena echoed the view of others who say that drivers often slow down to read the freeway signs, so she would like to know how well the program works before it is introduced to the Ventura County area.

The Daily News has a couple letters from people grumbling. The Times has a story on the grand plan. I believe (with a lot of experience) that these signs cause more problems than they alleviate and the people making decisions haven't a clue how the system works as a whole. Consider this quote:

"In general, the research shows very clearly that the better information about arrival time significantly reduces the burden people perceive," said Brian Taylor, director of UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies. He pointed to a study showing people felt less stressed on the Metro's Rapid bus line when they were able to see how many minutes until the next bus arrived.

So we're going extrapolate from a study on the perceptions of people standing around at stationary bus stations and somehow apply that to people flying down a freeway at 75 miles per hour. Sounds like a winning concept! Not to be left out, USC had to chime in:

"Improving people's states of information will in general make them less frustrated," said James Moore, chairman of USC's Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

I can't argue with that general idea. Heck, that's why I check the various traffic sites before leaving home. The problem isn't the information, it's the delivery system and the way people react to it. Had either of these traffic experts ever driven around near our wonderful freeway signs they might have learned something. Oops, wait, that's field research. My bad.

I'll go out on a limb here but I'd bet the reason the traffic backs up is because a lot of people slow down (and some even brake; and when one lane breaks the others do so in sympathy or something) to read the damned sign. I've seen this so often. Traffic comes to a halt, I flip around the dial looking for a cause and find nothing, get to the sign and realize that was the accident. Yes, I've seen real accidents (a few of them at the signs) and road breaks for crap on the roads cause the same problems, but it's far from a coincidence when it always ends in the same place (and that place is lit up with some useless message).

The sad reality is that as soon as the signs go on, traffics slows down in a very non linear way that I can only surmise based on far too much personal experimentation (I don't have the raw data and no one seems to be looking at it). In general, the pattern is much like what you'd see shortly after a major collision was finally cleared. At the scene (the signs), the traffic is moving somewhat slowly (mid 30's to 40's) and then opens up completely. A mile back it's stop and go, somewhere between 0 and 40. The further it backs up, the more sluggish the traffic reacts (because they have no idea what the hell is wrong). When the South (East) 101 sign at White Oak is on for any length of time, the traffic will typically come to a dead stop at Topanga and sometimes even further back. That's about a four mile traffic backup just so we can pass along a message.

Besides, we do have radio (if you're from these parts you know about KFWB and KNX, and if you're not, too bad) and we're got a bunch of new technologies coming that will make the sensing data available on the web today mobile. The signs feel like a feeble experiment gone horribly wrong and now CalTrans needs to justify their cost somehow. Can't we just say 'oops'?

I'm going to give this idiotic notion some time (and entirely avoid the 101 going east for a while), but I'm not hopeful.