Baylink

The 'Pasadena' sign at the 66th St intersection is out. Has been for sometime; didn't get to reporting it til now.

NB LT yellow face inop

Broken covers for a month or longer.

lighted sign for 54Av facing SB 49St traffic is out.

NB (and probably other 3) retroreflective coating either worn out or egged over; not visible from MUTCD distance.

Proceeding North on 64th St from 38th Ave, the stop sign at 40th Ave is *completely* obscured by a tree, and the next one, at 41st Ave is partially obscured, depending on how tall your vehicle is.

The 42nd Ave intersection, where you'd go in the creek if you didn't stop, is just fine. :-)

Northbound Pasadena traffic is encountering mis-synchronized signals at 1 Av S/Central Ave.

I approached a green light at 1 Av S to find 3 lanes of traffic piled up -- for over 30 seconds, possibly over a minute -- at Pasadena and Central, which signal was red.

In my previous experience, the Central signal is supposed to turn green shortly after the 1 Av S signal.

I infer that sync has slipped.

I do note with approval that the northbound traffic was smart enough not to block 1 Av S.

For at least 3 weeks now, the telco pedestal on the NW corner of the driveway to this MHP has been open. The metal pedestal was (presumably) hit by a car that misjudged the turn and creamed the casing; the cables/splices are up in the open air, not even wrapped to avoid water infiltration. There are a pair of safety cones flanking it, but I can't tell whose they are. Photo to follow.

Verizon probably ought to get an outside plant guy out to fix it before their PIC gets any ICKYier.

The RT lane NB needs confirmation signage that it is Right Turn Only particularly in light of the fact that the alignment of the intersection has changed 6 times during construction.

Because both driveways of the 8800 complex drain downhill to 49th St., the edge of the southbound strip floods in heavy rain, even though there is a drainage box in between the two driveways; today's lunchtime rainstorm caused about 3 inches of standing water in the lane.

The probable fix here is to reengineer the curb in that stretch of road so that the slope to the drain box is steeper; the box itself didn't seem overloaded.

If they *do* recurb this stretch, *they need to get the turnout radiuses right* (as they currently are not), and I will come back to haunt them if they screw that up too. :-)

In Other News: that's not the right Category; It's no longer permissible to leave Category unselected, and there's a *lot* of ground the list in the pulldown menu doesn't cover.

Even though this intersection was recently rebuilt, in heavy rains (more than 1/2"/hr for any period of time), the drainage and crowning are insufficient to take off the standing water, and amounts dangerous to traffic build up in the slow lane both NB on 49th St -- worst at and past the pedestrian island -- and WB on 9th Ave, past the CVS parking lot.

It's easy to get 3-4" of standing water in both of these locations after an hour or two of rain -- such as we've had the last 2 weeks, and have more of coming regardless of which side of the peninsula TS Chantal passes along.

I will attach images and.or video to this ticket the next time we have appreciable rain in that area -- that should be within 48 hours, right? :-)

The "66th St N" sign which faces NB Pasadena Ave traffic at the merge point has flickering illumination; the brightness cycles up and down at about 4-5Hz, quite uniformly.

The green signal face for the slow lane, NB Tyrone @ 22 Av, has partially failed; some of the LEDs are out, such that the lamp looks like a smiley-face from the opposing stopline. Presumably, it will finish failing sometime soon, and should be replaced before it amuses too many more people.

flickering left green arrow in center signal head, WB 75Av at Gulf

NB & SB stop signs both require replacement due to failure of retroreflective coating.

17th Ave does not stop, escalating the priority of this ticket.

...in addition to driver expectations.

At this intersectiion, as well as several others, the County seems to be testing out a flashing-yellow-left-arrow signal indication, as noted in this press release:

http://www.stpete.org/news/2012/10-25-2012_say_hello_to_st_petersburg_s_first_flashing_yellow_arrow.asp

There are two separate problems here, I'll take them one at a time:

1) That press release says, in pertinent part:

"""
At 34th St. N. and 38th Ave., a flashing yellow arrow will be visible for left-turning motorists after the solid green arrow, and before the solid yellow arrow phase, when motorists should be preparing to STOP. During the flashing yellow arrow, motorists are permitted to make a left-turn after yielding to oncoming traffic.
"""

Thankfully, whomever wrote that release was wrong, as that set of actions would result in the left turn phase off US 19 *starting protected, becoming unprotected, and then turning protected *again**, before finally turning red.

Clearly, this is so unexpected a turn of events as to cause new accidents, instead of the presumed goal of reducing them -- and it's pretty useless anyway, as it's only real impact is to allow the opposing straight ahead traffic to start a little earlier by unprotecting the last part of the turn phase.

But, there's a more important issue at hand here.

The MUTCD, 2003 edition, appears -- unless I'm misreading it -- to explicitly forbid this indication, in section 4D.11-D, where it says:

"""
If a signal face includes both circular and arrow signal lenses of the color that is to be flashed, only the circular signal indication shall be flashed.
"""

The light heads in question here are 5-face heads, with a circular red, and circular and left-arrow yellow and green lenses. Since that head includes a circular yellow, this section appears to forbid the flashing of yellow arrow.

Indeed, I can find only the barest degree of support for this indication in Chapter 4 at all, and only if one is willing to interpret against the clear prescription of 4D.06-C1b:

"""
During the permissive left-turn movement, all signal faces on the approach shall display
CIRCULAR GREEN signal indications.
"""

Section 4D.04-D3, in particular, says:

"""
Flashing RED ARROW and flashing YELLOW ARROW signal indications have the same
meaning as the corresponding flashing circular signal indication, except that they apply only to
vehicular traffic intending to make the movement indicated by the arrow.
"""

which is the only support I can find in the chapter at all for this indication.

The real underlying question, though, is this:

In displaying a flashing-yellow-arrow indication, we are overlaying a new semantic (flashing yellow, usually used to mean "this signal is not currently functioning properly") onto an old, old one: "turn arrow implies a protected turn", and the new semantic *deletes the safety critical part of the older one*, the "your turn is protected" part.

In my opinion -- and I speak as someone who keeps a copy of the MUTCD on their cellphone (my dad did signs and signals for the City of Boston for about 20 years) -- this semantic overloading is confusing at best, and at worse... is going to get people killed, when they assume that an arrow still means "protected", flashing or otherwise.

And, for what it's worth: *I FOLLOW SIGNS AND SIGNALS*, as well as 3 traffic reporters, and even though the press release in question did get play, *I stlil did not see it*.

So the odds of any given 70 year old having seen it are less than zero.

I think this is a bad idea, and I'd like to know what support the FDOT DTOE can provide for it's being done. Especially here, in the most populous county in the fourth most populous state in the country, with a markedly high percentage of older and snowbird drivers.

NB Starkey, turning left onto Bryan Dairy, the green arrow 'lamp' is inop this morning. I was not first at the light, so I cannot say if it was the whole head, or just the one lamp.

EB 22Av at 1St; the left lane green forward signal is out. It was green when I approached, not sure if the yellow or red are also out. Right lane signal green ok.

5th Av N, westbound, was just repainted approaching 9th St and passing it; the lanes are "Left only", "Ahead only", and "Ahead/Right Turn".

Alas, the portion of 5th Av on the west side of 9th St *only has one forward lane*; the part that used to be a second ahead lane has been realigned into a moved bicycle lane, as part of the move of the St Anthony's ER entrance.

Because of this, straight-thru traffic is improperly taking that right line, and then discovering that it has nowhere to go on the other side of the intersection.

I have seen no accidents yet (this is on my way home from work downtown, so I pass it frequently with decent traffic flows), but I have seen many near misses -- I myself did not realize that it had been changed the first time I went through it; luckily, I got stopped by the traffic signal.

But there is a full-speed merge or pedestrian accident just *waiting* to happen here, and the WB 5th approach right lane *needs to be repainted promptly*.

This is a life safety issue; I'll be monitoring the speed of response to it. Apologies for reporting it on a Friday afternoon...