Archive: Opinions

I experienced a miracle Monday.  Seriously, it was a real miracle.  Driving in Ithaca Monday morning I had green lights all the way down Fulton Street, and on the way back the lights were green all the way down meadow Street.  Before Monday this had happened to me exactly zero times since the the Octopus elimination project was implemented in 1996.  The Octopus was a tangle of roads, all in one intersection.  Fulton Street is more or less a straight line.  Yet it is not the fastest way to go north to south in the city.

I remember at that time Ithaca promised that traffic flow would be better without the Octopus, and that traffic lights along the route would be synchronized to facilitate smooth traffic flow.  And it would eliminate the high number of traffic accidents attributed to the Octopus.  Please stop laughing.  That is how I remember the project being characterized at the time.

I grew up in a big city, and I have been in some whopper traffic jams.  Once I got stuck in a massive jam on Route 95 south of Washington, D.C. that I was stuck in from about 5:30 in the afternoon to 4:00 the next morning.  One of the attractions of moving near a small city was that... maybe... there wouldn't be any.  I used to joke to my big-city friends that a traffic jam here was two cars and a chicken.  One visited and as I slowed to avoid hitting a car in front of me he asked, "Where's the chicken?"

Yet, what can only be called an incompetent implementation and maintenance of Fulton Street has more or less guaranteed that anyone who travels Route 13 will experience their very own traffic jam, replete with jerky stop and go traffic that often blocks cross streets when it's their time to go forward.

For some reason I don't understand, driving north on Meadow Street has relatively few snags, while driving south on Fulton Street is almost always bumper to bumper.  So they can do it right on Meadow Street, but not on Fulton Street?

And in a instance of bad karma (Ithaca's, I maintain, not mine), at the beginning of a trip to Virginia two years ago, I was driving on Fulton Street around 6am one morning with nary another vehicle in sight, when my car hit a plastic gas tank that somehow wedged itself under my car.  Dragging the gas for blocks until I realized that the noise I was hearing wasn't good (I am not so swift at 6 in the morning), I pulled into the Tops parking lot, parking one wheel on a curb to gain a little more space.  The only way to get rid of it was to kick the thing until it flew off the bottom of my car.  I smelled like gas all the way to Virginia.  I suppose it could have been worse: once I got out of the city I had a good time, but it could have been a blast.

I blame the city.  I have even heard a rumor that Ithaca does it on purpose (the bad traffic light synchronization, not the gas tank) to discourage driving in the city.  While that does sond like an Ithaca thing on one level, I can't imagine that any responsible municipality would stoop to a crazy, manipulative scheme like that that impacts (sometimes literally) thousands of people every day.

Fulton Street isn't only a hinderance for people who live here.  People who find themselves in Ithaca en route to someplace else get caught in the mess, as well.  A lot of cities have bypasses.  With our geography I am not sure where you would even put a bypass -- I have long said that we need a chunnel under Cayuga Lake... or would it be a lunnel?  It would be a lake tunnel, not a channel tunnel... or an iunnel if it went under the inlet?  Or a funnel if it went under Fulton Street...

The fact that Ithaca doesn't have a bypass puts more responsibility on the city (and the State -- isn't Route 13 a state road?) to ease traffic in every possible way, because Fulton and Meadow Streets are Ithaca's bypass.  And by that I do not mean that traffic jams are so aggravating that they cause heart blockages that require bypasses.

Why don't we ever hear that anyone in authority cares about this?  Where is the traffic study that will justify doing something to improve it?  Doesn't one person in local government drive that route?

I long for the halcyon days of the Octopus.  It may be a trick of memory, but it seems to me that it never took so long to traverse Ithaca through the Octopus as it does now on Fulton Street.  Plus it had a cool name: Octopus.

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