Please get in line ... it's Conga time
Like most men, I get my hair cut every couple of months whether it needs it or not.
(Does the younger generation still worry their manhood may be questioned if they frequent one of those joints ridiculed by our more traditional barbers because "They wet down your hair before they cut it," where the decor consists of fake Roman columns and artificial ivy and you can very well end up sitting next to some dame having her nails reprocessed from lavender to burnt cinnamon, hearing more than you ever really wanted to know about current trends in female diet and exercise? Well, heed the voice of experience, young man: If you can possibly afford it and your job description does not require you to keep your head shaved like an unripe peach, find a competent woman to cut your hair. When she's done, you'll look in the mirror and go, "My God, she's ruined me. I'll have to hide under the bed for a week till this grows out." But of course it doesn't matter what you think of your new "do" -- most men wouldn't look in a mirror for a month at a time if we didn't have to shave. The question is what the women in your life will think of the results. And by some strange alchemy forever unknowable by the male psyche, as you walk out of that joint, all slicked up and powdered and looking like a cross between an Italian pimp and a pink-tummied puppydog newly prepped for veterinary surgery, your Significant Others of the female persuasion will be moved to positive rapture, hugging you, smooching you, and -- here's the important thing -- occasionally even offering you food.)
But I did not repair to my keyboard today to write about hairdressing. (I've already taken enough grief for wearing this pink shirt.) No no, the point here is that at 11 a.m. of a recent weekday I found myself flouncing out of the Versailles Palace of Hair Splendor, headed back into the center of Las Vegas to resume my otherwise convincing disguise as a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. And what do you suppose I encountered on that journey?
Many who traverse the Vegas valley primarily at 8 in the morning or 4:30 in the afternoon would probably have shared my foolish presumption that the main bottlenecks to cross-valley traffic occur at the rush hours, and that transiting from the corner of Rainbow and Oakey to the massive Review-Journal print shop and railroad yard at Bonanza at MLK -- about six miles -- should be a snap at 11 in the morning, when the only parties with whom I'd be sharing the road would be auto parts delivery drivers and powderheads out scouting the day's first bingo game.
But it was not to be. Before I had proceeded more than a couple hundred yards down thinly traveled Oakey I noticed the cars ahead had slowed to a virtual crawl. What was going on? Were they avoiding some unfortunate dog wounded in the roadway, or slowing to ogle some particularly effective piece of cosmetic surgery as it sashayed past?
Of course not. It was a "school crossing zone" -- the only one I would pass that morning, as it turned out, from which we motorists could see an actual school. The bright primary-colored playground equipment stood vacant, the little charges all safely snugged into their classrooms behind a high chain-link fence. The architecture of our modern government youth propaganda camps is based more or less on the model of our penal institutions (form following function), and the chance of any of those young inmates being found out on the street at 11 a.m. on a weekday was in fact far lower than the chance they might drive their bikes into oncoming traffic at twilight, when the omnipresent flashers would of course be turned off in honor of rush hour.
No kids had been in the crosswalks for hours, nor would be for hours still, yet we crept along, dutifully obeying the 15 mph signs, till we emerged on the far side of this modern Charybdis, the dreaded school zone, and everyone started accelerating again.
Within a half mile we encountered another one. It looked like Oakey had been a bad choice. So I decided to cut up Arville to Sahara, figuring they wouldn't dare use flashing lights to snarl traffic on one of the town's major commercial thoroughfares in the middle of a busy weekday.
I hit another set of flashing yellow lights along Arville. No school in sight, of course. Presumably someone had determined that hypothetical, phantom schoolchildren might use the crosswalk to ford Arville on their way to or from some little brick schoolhouse blocks away ... had any schoolchildren actually been walking to or from school at 11 a.m., of course.
East on Sahara, now venting my frustration by accelerating a bit faster than I normally would have, I'm sure. And sure enough, there it was, right across the commercial zone of Sahara between Arville and Valley View -- no school in sight, but another set of flashing yellow "school crossing" lights turning the weekday traffic into a 25-mile-an-hour conga line.
I hung a left on Rancho, trying to recall if I'd ever noticed a school along Rancho between Sahara and Bonanza.
I hadn't, but there was the school crossing zone anyway, just north of Charleston, flashing away and snarling traffic again, with nary a school or a schoolchild in sight. Nor, I'd be willing to wager, had one been seen since 9 a.m., nor would another one appear till after 2.
By now the self-righteous will doubtless be whining that it's better to be safe than sorry; there's no harm in slowing the entire valley to a permanent 25 or even 15 miles an hour if it spares the life of a single child; we'll all still get where we're going eventually.
In fact, time is money and we all pay the price of the unnecessary extra time it takes the delivery driver to get across this town with our milk, or bread, or our spark plugs, albeit the incremental charges don't get itemized on our bills. Unnecessary inefficiency not only makes us all poorer, but most urban auto accidents are actually caused by speed differentials -- by the slowing down and speeding up and general confusion and frustration caused by this absurd patchwork of unnecessary and unpredictable stop-and-go zones.
Not only unnecessary, but (as it turns out) illegal.
Nevada Revised Statute 484.781, titled "Adoption of manual and specifications for devices for control of traffic by department of transportation," was adopted as required by federal law for any state accepting federal highway funds, and stipulates that all speed limit signs, flashers, and other "control devices" must be posted in compliance with the national Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), published by the Federal Highway Administration.
And the MUTCD stipulates that such signs may only be posted "after an engineering study has been made in accordance with established traffic engineering practices," which engineering study "shall be documented" in writing.
State and federal law -- almost entirely ignored by Nevada cops and courts out of fear they might reduce vital "speeding ticket" revenues -- thus require a written engineering study justifying any speed limit posted, and such studies must take into account any special conditions relating to time or season, according to Chad Dornsife, Nevada representative of the National Motorists Association (chad@hwysafety.com).
My friends the all-day flashing lights "are speed traps, created primarily for purposes of enhancing municipal revenues" through the issuance of bogus and illegal "speeding tickets," Dornsife insists. "The FHA manual allows lower speed limits due to special conditions" like children in crosswalks, but the lower limits can be applied only at reasonable times, Dornsife explains. States that obey the law generally find their engineering studies dictate turning off the yellow school flashers half an hour after the kids have safely arrived at school, reactivating them only for an appropriate hour or so in the afternoon.
Until local authorities adjust their yellow flashers in accordance with sound engineering principles, we do have a remedy: Refuse to pay those tickets. Send a certified letter to the city traffic engineer, demanding that he tell you in writing whether he has a written engineering study on file, justifying that specific flashing yellow light at 11 in the morning. After all, the speed limit is invalid without it ... it's the law.
(And no, I've never gotten a ticket for blowing through a school zone. You think I want to muss up this nice haircut?)
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $96 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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