There’s something wrong with Philly traffic signals. I first noticed problems a few months ago, when lights started malfunctioning all over the city. Luckily, and a little mysteriously, the vast majority of the failures involved “pedestrian” lights, or signals at the intersection of 2, 1 way roads. The failures affected lights pointed against the flow of traffic. Put another way, if traffic traveled South and West, only signals facing North or East were problematic. The malfunctions only affected pedestrian traffic - remaining at worst - a minor inconveniecnce.
Being a bit paranoid, I wondered in the back of my head if the signal breakdowns were deliberate attempts to test Philadelphia’s reaction to sabotage. I remember watching on Frontline and reading in newspapers how easily traffic lights could be compromised. I also remember reading – days before the lights started failing – how intelligence services, (I think the NSA was involved) would be sticking their feelers out in just this sort of way, to see how various infrastructure services would react.
Now like I said, I’m probably just being paranoid on the anti-terror front, but the fact remains there is something wrong with Philly traffic signals, and whatever it is, it’s getting worse. At this point, malfunctions have started to affect traffic, and with it, public safety. A few weeks ago, I saw a busy intersection with two solid, unchanging red lights.
Yesterday, a light at Broad and Walnut took at least five minutes to change from red to green. Broad street was backed up down to and around city hall. This morning, the busy intersection at 29th and Chestnut was completely offline. A stop sign was nailed to one inoperable signal at the top of an I-76 off ramp. On Chestnut street itself, the light was stuck on red. With 3 lanes on Chestnut and an off ramp, onramp and regular traffic lanes on 29th street, this intersection is congested and dangerous on a normal day. Today it was a nightmare. Whatever’s going on with the cities traffic signals needs to be addressed and corrected immediately. That's all for now.
i've noticed the lights too
I've noticed that at many lights on my bike commute from South/Broad to 49/Market that there are several malfunctioning lights. Lights where the Red light is permanently on and the other lights change as well resulting in Red-Yellow and Red-Green lights. I'm constantly screeching to a halt when I see this to make sure I don't get slammed by oncoming traffic.
It's been a problem in my neighborhood
The light at 20th and Market was down Friday for hours and when they fixed it, they did something to screw it up, because it takes forever to change now. A couple hours after it went wacky they had a cop out there directing traffic, but there just isn't enough people power out there to have someone directing traffic at every corner. It is a problem.
29/Chestnut
While biking back from work, I noticed that the 29/Chestnut light was still out at ~4.10p. I noticed that there were what appeared to be fragments of a car bumper. I think that there was an accident there at some point of the day.
This morning
I usually ride in, but this morning took the bus. From Walnut street, I saw a severely totaled car in the 29th street median, between walnut and chestnut. The accident looked very bad. It would be a good guess that it had something to do with that light.
If I were a working journalist, I'd try to figure out what's going on with all the malfunctioning lights.
West Philly Represent
West Philly has such light problems throughout, too. I see them mostly at the smaller intersections--43rd and Pine is a common one.