Letter: Save road rage for bureaucrats

Sunday, Jan. 1, 2006 | 7:53 a.m.

It was 1962 and taxpayers in the little town of Oradell, N.J., where I lived temporarily, grew impatient over their unsynchronized traffic lights. They passed an ordinance to cut off funding if their computerized system was not working properly within another six months. They did not have to cut funding. Under the threat of lost paychecks, the engineers and programmers managed to pacify the residents with a successful system.

Digital computers had barely evolved from huge banks of vacuum tubes to wired transistorized circuit boards and used "Teletypes" for input/output. This system's field input sensors were mainly relays and long copper wires.

Today, we Clark County motorists are similarly provoked over our traffic light systems, but so far have been able to just cry and fret.

The size of cities and traffic complexity, along with computerized systems and their peripherals, has progressed mightily in the past 43 years. Analytical and programming tools have also grown with special computer programs for calculating flows and results.

Bureaucrats operating under a protective shell, not the taxpayers, now have direct oversight of these seemingly unending projects. Today's taxpayers need to find a way to crack the shell and get these officials' attention as Oradell did 43 years ago.

Richard E. Law

Las Vegas

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