Description
This traffic light is no longer needed. The change in traffic flow was designed to eliminate traffic down this street. There is no legitimate reason to keep this light, it only encourages people to race to the light down summer street and creates more backup. Every traffic light costs tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands of dollars) in wasted fuel, and thousands of hours of lost time each year.
5 Comments
JohnInBrewer (Guest)
I fully agree... Probably no funds available to remove it!
ryan (Guest)
How do you propose traffic from the waterfront turn left onto Main Street? Ho do you propose traffic be able to turn left to go to the waterfront?
Anonymous
The volume of traffic is relatively small. The should use new interchange on summer street. Further, railroad street should be one way going into waterfront with only a right turn from main street possible. It's silly to have 1000 cars metered by a stop light to make it so 10 cars can avoid driving an extra 1/10 mile.
Brian (Guest)
The traffic from Railroad street should be one way going into railroad street with only a left turn available from Main Street headed towards Bangor. All other traffic into and out of the waterfront would go through Summer Street. 95% (my guesstimate) of the traffic that uses the Railroad Street approach from Main street are cars turning and going up summer street like they always did. It's foolish to restrict the flow of 1000 cars so that 5 or 10 can access the waterfront via this route. It would be much better to have the 5 or 10 cars that are actually going down to the waterfront use the new interchange on Summer Street. It is estimated that every traffic light on a busy road like this one wastes 200,000 gallons of fuel annually. See this link: http://www.iihs.org/research/paper_pdfs/mf_1848.pdf
If we told the people of Maine that they could save $700,000 a year by getting rid of this light, what would they vote for?
Unless traffic lights are absolutely necessary, they are a huge waste of time and fuel, and by extension, money.
Brian (Guest)
Oops, I meant RIGHT turn from Main street headed towards Bangor.