Dear Editor,
So, I leave Simpson Bay at the Burger King restaurant at 5:00pm yesterday and stop dead in traffic. I wait the usual 15 minutes for things to move a bit and nothing. Not a wheel turns. “Hmmm,” I muse, “must be an accident on the hill,” so I turn around and head towards the bridge.
I get to the bridge and note traffic stopped dead in the road all the way to the airport. “Gee, must be a really bad accident,” I think to myself.
The bridge is stopped dead as well, but moves. So, 30 minutes later I get by Ace and traffic is still slow, but moving, and another 15 minutes later I am at the bottom of the hill and lo and behold, there is no accident at all – it is two traffic cops screwing up traffic so badly it’s almost hard to believe. They have two lanes of filter traffic stopped dead while one lane muddles around the corner and heads up the hill.
So understand this: the European cops who invented roundabouts so that multiple lanes could filter simultaneously, which works just fine every night, now suddenly decide to become human chicanes and make sure that every single person on the island has absolutely no chance at all of getting home at any reasonable hour.
News flash to the Traffic Department: you got rid of the traffic lights and put in the roundabouts for a very good reason. If you don’t remember what that was, let me remind you: it’s because they make traffic flow better.
You did the same thing when you stuck a guy at the Harley Davidson intersection in the mornings and backed traffic up to Marigot every day. Please send your traffic cops back to their desks and let the traffic take care of itself. It does a hell of a lot better without your help.
An hour and 15 minutes to get home in Great Bay from Simpson Bay. In a word: “Unacceptable!”
Steven Johnson
