Our town has more concrete traffic dividers in the streets than any other place I’ve seen. Every year cars are damaged when, because of darkness or bad weather, the driver doesn’t notice one of them and runs into it.
Sometimes those impediments to the flow of traffic serve a useful purpose, but they often do more harm than good, and sometimes they’re just plain silly.
The most egregious example of “just plain silly,” at least to my knowledge, is in the short stretch of Southeast 15th Street between 164th and 167th avenues. The city of Vancouver should make those dividers more visible by painting them. The city could even go one step further and attach reflectors.
The money involved is small change compared to the cost of the dividers themselves, and the result would be safer streets for everyone.
