After Mayor Bill de Blasio’s State of the City speech, we asked readers to share their “Save Our City” thoughts. Queens resident Bart Daudelin offered a simple suggestion that could help alleviate a huge headache.
“Highway congestion is a particular problem in New York City,” he notes in an e-mail. “Part of it is consistent and predictable.”
Drivers will inevitably find holdups anywhere there is a major exit — on the Grand Central Parkway leading to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway to the Long Island Expressway and the GCP, and the Gowanus Expressway to the “notch” toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Everyone waits to the last minute and merges, reducing flow” for all vehicles, mergers and nonmergers alike.
Daudelin’s proposal: Push exiting and merging cars into exit-only lanes earlier.
In cities such as Atlanta, he has seen “cones that essentially force drivers to commit and stay in once committed.” They seem to work. “A hundred plastic cones could save time, reduce crashes and reduce emissions from all the cars slowed to a crawl, idling while rude drivers merge at the last minute,” he says.
Traffic expert Sam Schwartz rages against those drivers — the ones who cross “gore areas, the painted channelization at road forks, to beat the line.” He calls them “cheaters.”
“Law-abiding drivers hate that behavior,” Gridlock Sam, who popularized the word “gridlock” before becoming New York City traffic commissioner in 1982 and then chief engineer of the Department of Transportation, told The Post. “One, they waited patiently while someone pushed ahead of them, and two, drivers not exiting are blocked by these cheaters.”
Schwartz says the New York Police Department “occasionally enforces” the markings “by placing a car at the gore and writing tickets to those stupid enough to cross in front of them.” He points out that the city has tubular dividers — he calls them “probes” — at some merge points, such as the Holland Tunnel outbound, “but it’s really to prevent lane changing.”
Not everyone exiting at the last minute is a cheater, of course. “There is another side to this issue”: The painted gore areas “are ‘forgiving’ for the driver who honestly makes a mistake and wants to take the exit (or not take it) but finds himself in the wrong lane,” Schwartz says. (Though data show tourists — who would be the most unfamiliar with exits — tend to stick to Manhattan.)
And he asks an important question about Daudelin’s idea: “Will the cheating just shift to the start of the probes? I’m not sure this has been studied as to safety and performance.”
Still, the traffic guru gives the proposal his stamp of approval: “Nonetheless, it is worth considering at a few locations with rampant cheating and seeing how it works.” Experimentation, provided it’s safe and well-publicized, never hurts.
— The Post Editorial Board
