Cone Zones and Float Time at DIA
A great deal of time has passed in which I have been growing older. A symbol of this that might give you some indication of exactly how much time is the following (fogey alert!): when I was just starting to drive, and when there was street-repair work being done, the areas under construction were not marked by orange plastic cones (this was well before Dustin Hoffman learned the word "plastic") and pre-fab sawhorses with flashing lights powered by battery packs. They were marked by sandbags topped with what appeared to be anarchist bombs ... bowling-ball sized spherical objects filled with kerosene and topped by a flaming wick, specifically designed to give off as much smoke as possible in the daytime and as much light as possible at night.
Imagine! How totally un-PC such a device must seem to modern eyes! It was wasteful of petroleum, a dangerous potential source of brush fires, an egregious air polluter (and water polluter if it should rain), and an attractive nuisance to teen-aged miscreants. This last I can attest to from direct experience.
But what interests me about the change in road-hazard safety notification devices is not their form, but their location, i.e., near the work! In the olden days (see, I warned you!), the warning markers for road crews working were placed alongside the location where they were working! What a concept.
As an example, and I am totally not making this up, say a crew of several men (and, by the way, the work crew would have been composed exclusively of men in those days) were replacing a length of deteriorated curb along a length of a fairly major neighborhood street ... a street with maybe two lanes in each direction, and with houses on each side fronted by lawns, a sidewalk, and that usually-weedy strip of wasteland next to the curb sarcastically called a "plantspace." They would erect their sand-bag barriers in about the middle of the lane adjacent to the curb, for the width of the working area, plus maybe twenty feet either way along the street. Within this "safe" area everyone would be actually working on the project, except when leaning on their shovel telling dirty jokes or perhaps taking a break. When the concrete mixer came, one of the guys working there would drop his shovel, and step out to direct traffic so that the truck could back into the work area and dump his load of mud, then the "flagman" would go back to work.
No, seriously.
Today, we all know how this work area would appear. There would still be about six guys (oh, yes, all still guys) working on the project, but there would also be two women stationed a block in either direction from the work site each with a day-glo vest, filter cigarettes, a reversible "stop/caution" sign on a stick, and a walkie-talkie. The purpose of these women is two-fold: first, to better balance the gender distribution of road-work crews, and second, to direct traffic three lanes over into the far-curb lane of the on-coming traffic (or in the case of the on-coming direction, to narrow the two lanes of on-coming traffic down to one lane), and to stop traffic in alternating directions in order to fit four busy lanes of traffic into one. This new arrangement is necessary because the "cone zone" for such a project will now extend not to the middle of the lane adjacent to the work, but a little bit into the lane adjacent to the curb on the opposite side of the street!
I want to make myself absolutely clear on this. In spite of what I have said above, I do not object to hiring women to fill the lucrative jobs as flaggers for construction crews, although I do wonder whether it really has bettered the lot of women to be hired to stand around in the rain as the only unprotected living fixed object in the midst of traffic on busy streets, chain smoking, while the men they are protecting are slinking behind several layers of barriers (flashing lights, sawhorses, piles of dirt and rubble, jersey barriers, and all their corporate and personal pickup trucks parked in the work zone), merely because the owners of the construction companies know in their heart of hearts that women are simply not physically capable of heavy work like leaning on a shovel.
No, my objection is to the inflation in the size of cone zones. It has become absurd.
I know this is driven by concern for the safety of the construction workers. By OSHA regulations, corporate liability lawyers, loss-control consultants from insurance companies, and union-stipulated labor-contract provisions. And I also know that it really easy to whine when I have never had to try to do hard manual labor (I could actually stop right there) while standing inches away from hurtling tons of iron piloted by possibly-inebriated teenagers.
But still.
Doesn't anyone notice the mayhem that results from the prolonged and ridiculously-enlarged diversion of traffic for these little projects? Has anybody studied the fender-benders, hospitalized flattened flaggers, lost time, and subsequent post-office shootings resulting from frustrated drivers stopped for the third week in a row to get past a minor sidewalk repair?
Not to mention, even if there is no law, shouldn't these work crews be morally bound to remove their f***ing "Road Work Ahead - Merge Right" signs when they're not actually working there any more ... like nights (meaning after 3:00 p.m.) and weekends?
Not that I'm critical.
Well.
Compare doing what you have to to prevent being impaled on the front bumper of a careening SUV to simply being late for a plane, and what do you find?
You find Karen and me, oddly enough, sitting in the lounge of gate B16 of Denver International Airport (which everybody calls DIA except the FAA and the airlines, who call it DEN) more than three hours before our flight is scheduled to leave.
We want to be sure to get at the airport at least two hours earlier than our scheduled departure, as advised by the Homeland Security Administration, because, after all the threat level is ORANGE!, the next-to-the-highest threat level, and we should all be really scared and willing to submit ourselves to prolonged and intrusive personal search requiring public removal of various items of clothing and seizure of liquid cosmetics, even though this threat level has been hovering at ORANGE! for several years, during which the scariest thing at most airports has been the rise in price at the gas stations near the rental car returns. Move those cones one lane over!
And who knows how long it's gonna take to check in, what with reduced staffing by the airlines? Move those cones!
And who knows how long it's gonna take to check in that rental car? Move the cones over another half a lane.
And what if there's a line at the gas station? Move the cones over. And hire flaggers!
And what if there's a traffic jamb between our house and the airport? Move those cones a big lane plus a center turn aisle.
And what if we oversleep? Move the cones over, and while you're at it, move 'em a block or so away in each direction!
So here we are for hours on end, not comfortably early, exactly, but safely early. We are safely sitting in the lounge out on concourse B, safely watching the other passengers doing sudokus, eating Quiznos and drinking safe, vendor-enriching, HSA-approved bottled water for hours on end because none of that stuff happened.
But it might have.
We in our country have emasculated ourselves.
posted by Mique @ 12:02 AM
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