The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is the only efficient way most people in Maryland, Washington, DC, and some parts of West Virginia and Virginia have available to get to the “Eastern Shore” of Maryland, Virginia and southern Delaware. There are two spans. The Southern-most span opened first, in the mid-1950s, with two lanes. The bridge became so incredibly popular, however, that a second span with three lanes was added in the early 1970s. You only pay a toll as you head east on the bridge. Over the years, the bridge has become far more crowded, as you can imagine and as it became more crowded, the back-ups to get onto the bridge have become progressively worse. In response to the interminable lines at the toll booths most Friday evenings during the summer, the Maryland Department of Transportation has added a lot more toll booths. You know, because more toll booths means shorter lines, right?
Wrong.
Essentially, some :expert decided that more toll booths was the answer, but at best, that decision was reactionary, and without much thought, because it has actually led to worse delays and longer traffic jams. And they're worse for a very foreseeable reason. There are now ELEVEN toll lanes before the eastern entrance to the bridge, but there are STILL only TWO eastbound lanes on the bridge itself. That means we essentially have ELEVEN lanes of traffic merging into TWO on heavy traffic days, and it’s that attempt to merge that causes the terrible jams that currently exist. The real solution -- the non-reactionary solution -- for the huge traffic jams would be to CLOSE most of the toll lanes when traffic is heavy. But imagine the public reaction if there was a backup on the Bay Bridge, and only four toll lanes were open. The politicians who have to make the decisions would be skewered.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with politics these days. Politicians are faced with reactionary opinions, offered up by professional pundits, whose main goal is to stoke the fires among the populous, and who seem incapable of looking at the big picture. Reactionary opinions are, by definition, uninformed. You can't possibly understand a situation without considering it carefully. For example, if you had just been in a three mile backup before the Bay Bridge, and saw that seven toll lanes were closed, you'd assume that was why traffic was clogged, and you'd be on the phone with your legislator demanding they all be opened. But when I explained to you that eleven toll lanes makes traffic move faster when it's slow, but has the opposite effect when traffic is heavy, because the effect of eleven lanes of traffic merging into two has the effect of clogging the pipeline, so to speak, you would calmly see that, and realize that MDOT officials were SMART to close most of the toll plazas.
Uninformed opinions seem to weigh too heavily on the system these days. Yes, I’m referring to teabaggers, of course, who have such strong opinions on the Constitution despite having never read it. But a lot of it comes from our side of the aisle, too. While most liberals are very level-headed and reasonable, and trust President Obama, we have a number of pundits – whom the Obama Administration has rightly dubbed “The Professional Left,” who have a lot of pointed opinions about everything, but who seem incapable of looking at the big picture, and considering the political repercussions of what they demand. Their attitude is very strident, and very sure, but in the end, it’s also very reactionary and (usually) wrong.
Consider the consistent whining from the professional lefties when it comes to President Obama’s “kill list.”
