Michigan basks (for lack of a better, more truthful word) in a huge deficit that will produce very scary ramifications come September. Educational institutions are threatened to their core. Libraries close or merge. Recreation complexes on the municipal level are becoming piecemeal (and in Detroit, you might as well forget it). This means the future of the children born to lead this country in the future will be affected negatively.
To get to those ever-shrinking number of locations, we need to travel more, and in spite of the best efforts, the road is literally becoming bumpy again. For several years now, Michigan motorists have had to play "Dodge The Orange Barrel" on highways and local streets. We are supposed to be in a seven-year program that makes 90% of Michigan roads rated "good", yet word comes that highway funding will dry up unless stimulus money is put into the budget. Great, more of the pothole-laden mess that we've spent five years trying to avoid through all these detours and such.
And in all that red-ink panic, they're replacing all the traffic lights. Where is the funding coming from for those? And how are we able to support their installation when everyone is out there pushing the panic button?
In downtown Garden City, for instance, they're not only replacing the lights themselves, but also the old-style, decorative columns that support them... just ten years after they were first installed. On some of the other streets, instead of stringing the lights on one line, they're stringing together four lines, one in each direction, which increases the cost of labor & materials. And there's nothing really wrong with the traffic lights they're replacing. They simply want to push for LED lighting, which they claim will have cost savings in the future.
The future? What about now? What about the people & institutions that could use a cash infusion now? Will we base a future on what we know, what we've learned, and what institutions we learned from? Or will we base it on a beautiful traffic signal on a decorative column, designed to be asthetically pleasing and be a boom to downtown business?
Please! As long as there is a regular program to replace burnt bulbs on signals, can't their lifespan be extended a few more years while money goes to places that really need it?
