Letters to the Editor

Control traffic with devices, not tickets

Over the years, I have taken a strong and often unsuccessful interest in making our Winter Park roads safer for all and more pleasant to drive. Fortunately, the city’s traffic engineer values much of my incessant input.

Among my many pursuits are the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program, working to restore driver’s education in the public schools (a huge failure on my part as OCPS subsequently eliminated the last vestige of the program this school year), imploring our City Commission to modernize our several-decades-old school crosswalk technologies (Lakemont Avenue at the elementary school being a prime case in point — nada again), and curtailing drinking and driving (as evidenced by the many empty beer cans along our roads).

My most recent effort was having 1,000 Please Drive With Extraordinary Care bumper stickers printed. I gave 500 of the stickers to the city, and we are beginning to see them on our city’s vehicles.

I have long been at odds with our Winter Park Police Department’s philosophy of traffic enforcement. They take a broad view of an omnipresent “force” by strict and regular enforcement of moving violations on our arterial roads. The view is stemming from, in part, a belief that constant police presence globally deters criminal activity. Perhaps. But what I see is that our police are out there, day in and day out, and every day there’s another new customer, sometimes a repeat offender. Anecdotally, I was just told of a guy who got two speeding tickets in the same week, same location, from the same officer. This type of enforcement is what I characterize as targeting low-hanging fruit.

But that’s almost an aside. I am a big proponent of traffic calming. If you want people to adhere to speed limits, then you have to physically force them to slow down. People habituate to signage, lights and traffic enforcement; and worse, with the explosion of mobile phone chatter and text messaging, they are really zoned out.

Palmer Avenue is a good case in point. The limit is 20 mph. Good Lord! I know I can’t go that slowly without a concentrated effort, and my eye on the speedometer when it should instead be on the road. Police traffic enforcement can’t be 24/7. Signage and flashing lights may slow down 85 percent of the traffic, but it’s the 15 percent that we need to be worried about. And Palmer is similar to Winter Park Road. Many people feel the posted speeds are just too low — I know I feel that way about Winter Park Road. And the WPPD is like Joe Friday: we don’t post ‘em, just enforce ‘em.

There are a number of low cost/low manpower solutions such as speed cushions, raised curb separators and detectable pavement warnings. But right now, Winter Park has two primary weapons in its arsenal: signage and traffic enforcement — and you all know the Einstein quote about insanity. We need Winter Park traffic control to come into the 21st century. And here’s your chance. Attend the Winter Park Traffic Forum at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7 at the Rachel D. Murrah Civic Center.

—William Shallcross

Winter Park

Values decline in political system

It is unfortunate that our politicians don’t appear to be doing what they were elected to do: represent their constituents. There was a time when even members of Congress were responsive to the people. However, it has deteriorated to such an extent that it is now “all for one and one for one”. It appears that the purpose of politicians is to see how long they can stay in office and how much they can get for themselves.

It wasn’t so long ago that giving money to a politician to vote a certain way was considered a crime. Today, providing money by registered lobbyists to support (the nice word) a specific agenda is considered perfectly legal. Of course, promising something in return for a vote worked out behind closed doors is a way around even criminal laws. No one really looks unless it becomes ridiculous. It might be the promise of a job, a contract, cash later or whatever — we are slowly deteriorating into how Third World countries operate, but in a more sophisticated way.

The whole decay of our representative system has filtered down to even the small city and town level. A case in point is in the city of Maitland. A council member asked Councilwomen Linda Frosch why she and two others never discuss why they were voting a certain way. The answer was that the law says that I don’t have to and I don’t intend to. Mayor Doug Kinson chimed in, well it’s not “never” and the statement was corrected to be “hardly ever.” Whether it’s because politicians were told to vote a certain way, just followed others’ vote, don’t understand the issue or it’s none of the public’s business, the representative concept of the public seems to have become a thing of the past in most politicians’ minds.

I vividly remember a citizen saying, when he was confronted with the facts, that a person running for office was corrupt. His response was, “I don’t care if a politician is corrupt, cheats, steals, doesn’t follow the law, takes kickbacks or is immoral as long as he gets something done.” This is now for many where we are heading. A solution to at least slow things down is to never vote for a person already in office, unless of course the person running against him is an exposed crook, and we have some of those.

—Bill Kahn

Maitland