Houston drivers want to get their signals straight

01:39 PM CDT on Thursday, October 28, 2004

By Dan Lauck / 11 News

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Houston is a city in a hurry. A city of four million people perpetually coming and going, apparently with appointments to keep and deadlines to make. All of them, it seems, continually race against the clock.

Then the construction began and streets closed. Horns blared, nerves frayed and gridlock ensued. It was as if every light suddenly turned red for Houston's drivers.

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Approximately two-thirds of the city's signals allow for only protected left turns.

Bill White was elected, in part, to fix it.

The Mayor, even with a driver and Town Car, still suffers the same traffic delays as everyone else. He knows the frustrations.

But while state engineers began the expansion of the Katy Freeway -- a project that now carries the staggering price tag of $100 million a mile -- White vowed to get the little things right.

"Getting traffic signals timed right, getting the stalled or wrecked vehicle off the road quickly, making sure that the traffic signals you have replaced with the latest technology actually work," says Mayor White.

A good example is that buried beneath the street at many intersections throughout Houston are loop detectors that can sense whether there are cars waiting in the left-turn lane.

If no cars are waiting, the computer inside a box is supposed to skip the green light for that lane. When White's administration took over, they discovered that only 20 percent of the loop detectors actually worked.

They say their predecessors didn't want to pay to maintain them. That meant that drivers would sit and wait -- for nothing.

Drivers on Memorial, for example, have to stop for a red light at Brittmore, even when there's not a single car coming from the other direction.

"There's all kinds of situations at which we arrive at a light and there's no cars around. It's the middle of the night, that sort of thing, and it drives you nuts to sit through a long light," says one driver.

At a number of locations there are no loop detectors or motion-detecting cameras, and the traffic ends up tied in knots.

David Crossley, a transportation expert, says just take a look at Westheimer from above to get a better idea.

"You'll see these knots of cars, then a quarter mile of empty space. Then there is another knot of cars. That's because the traffic lights aren't working," he says.

Timing those lights is now a city priority, but there are other problems, such as intersections that allow only protected left-hand turns.

David Worley, one of the city's chief traffic engineers, says an intersection at Richmond Avenue is too busy to also allow unprotected left turns after the protected arrow goes off.

"You've got a lot going on at this intersection. There's not enough gaps to get those cars through safely," he says.

Maybe not during the peak of morning drive time, but later in the day, drivers sit and wait and count the seconds as they pass.

If the traffic signal also allowed unprotected left turns, then the cars in the left turn lane could move through the intersection.

"If you have the opportunity to turn left, and there are no cars coming, you want that opportunity. Yeah, it's stupid to have the light red for left turn people," Crossley says.

"I've got 2,400 signals to manage, and to time every signal for every minute of the day ... it's impossible," says Worley.

He says two-thirds of the city's signals allow for only protected left turns.

The idea originally was to err on the side of safety and protect drivers from themselves.

Now, drivers just want the green.