More Relative Traffic Engineering

At the risk of being accused of piling on, I submitted a corrective letter regarding Sunny Schubert's column to the Herald-Independent. Two points are worth a bit of emphasis.

After the hilarity of the situation wore off - mostly - it occurred to me that just a tiny bit of fact-checking would have revealed the identification error before it went to print.

The initial error is somewhat understandable. I blog about Sunny's incorrect faux traffic engineering claim and then Lindsay Wood Davis writes a letter to the editor in the same week on the same topic. Monona is such a small community that Sunny either knew or easily learned (perhaps from one of her kids who are about the same ages as mine) that I have a daughter named Lindsay. She probably did not know that my son and LWD's son are good friends and that yet another Lindsay Wood is their mutual friend and fellow MGHS student, but she is also not my daughter.

***

More relatives of mine, Kerry Wood (is a Brewers jersey in his future?) and Gordon Wood (the historian, not the Australian murderer):

***

I was glad to read that Sunny now agrees that traffic engineering is not fake. For some reason, she still wants to deride their work. Perhaps your paper may also want to take a look at ample research on the relative effectiveness of various traffic engineering measures, including traffic calming. See for example, 'Traffic Calming: State of the Practice', ITE/FHWA, August 1999.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) also has a traffic calming seminar on their web site (requires PowerPoint):

http://www.ite.org/traffic/tcseminar.asp

The City of Middleton has adopted a Neighborhood Traffic Management Program that includes quite specific data at page 3-12.

(http://www.ci.middleton.wi.us/City/Departments/works/Engineering/NTMP%20Report.pdf).