Today, as I was driving to work, I noticed a problem.  The traffic lights were out at two busy intersections along the light rail corridor. As I was driving to the intersection, I thought, oh no, this will take forever to cross South Blvd. I was wrong. Turns out that the lights being completely dark was a good thing. There was far less congestion than usual. Traffic in all directions was actually moving through the intersection more efficiently than with a functioning light! There was a cop parked at the convenience store at the corner and he wasn’t even out of his car. I guess he figured all he could do by trying to direct traffic would have been to muck it up worse than the traffic lights usually do. So, he was wisely just sitting there.

So, what does this say about our traffic engineers?