Not Really Rolling Along

Usually my commute to Maryland from Virginia during rush hour has been pretty mundane. I hit the occasional slow spot of traffic but it's typically an anomaly rather than the norm. However since schools opened the traffic has been anything but pleasant and yesterday it was nightmarish. Many people in the area most likely know about the traffic light computer problem that was the culprit. What the computer does is it controls the timings of lights and the synchronization so that during rush hour the main arteries that carry the most traffic are kept green longer and then reversed in the evenings. However around 3AM on Wednesday morning the computer showed signs of failing and by the time rush hour was set to kick into full swing, the computer had completely failed.

It's interesting (now that I'm through one bit of traffic for the day) how much we rely on computers to keep us moving throughout the day. I mean there hasn't been a single day since I began working over fifteen years ago where I haven't used a computer. Nowadays computers control practically every aspect of our lives. Need to call customer service? Before you get to the operator who is working at a call center in India you have to go through a whole littany of menu options meant to speed up the process but when that system fails then you end up hitting a major roadblock and productivity goes down. Plus I think part of the reason that when a failure like the traffic light failure occurs it's because we follow the old adage that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

According to authorities, the computer system used to control the traffic lights in Montgomery County are using technology that was around during the waning days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency. For those keeping score (or whose math may be a little fuzzy) that means that it is about thirty some years old! Is it any wonder then that we're facing such a big problem when the system goes down? Remember the panic after companies realized that the computer systems that ran practically everything here in the States would suffer potentially catastrophic problems in 1999 on New Year's when the 2000's began? Remember the rush to update our systems? It's not like people didn't know about it before but why the sudden rush? Because people didn't care to think about the problem until it was one. That's called procrastination.

Now I'm not saying that Montgomery County should have invested in a state of the art system over a decade ago nor am I saying that the problem should never have occured in the first place but what I am saying is that there should be a backup system in place that will kick in if the main system is incapcitated. It seems like common sense I suppose but it's not so common these days. Now had one anticipated that perhaps the day would come that the computer system that heretofore ran without issue would suddenly fail then perhaps the traffic issues drivers have been facing the last two days would have occurred but then again there's no guarantee. Computers have made things easier for us but they have also led us to think less or at least fail to understand just how well the computer has been programmed.

Remember the airline crash last year where the pilots failed to understand what the plane's computer was trying to do to prevent a crash? It's possible (though in no way a certainty) that the incident could have been avoided. The plane attempted to enter a shallow dive to gain speed to prevent the plane from stalling. The pilots thought it meant the plane was crashing and fought the computer and the result was that the plane crashed. Now in Montgomery County the problem isn't necessarily so dire but it is still a problem nonetheless. But now take for example the Metro Red Line crash from several months ago. There again the culprit was outdated equipment and a failure on the part of humans to act.

The crash occurred because the computer failed to recognize that another train was on the track but also the human operator failed to apply the emergency brakes in time. The result was deadly and is just further proof that we need to stop relying so much on computers and ensure that we use our brains that much more. Now using our brains may not make much difference in terms of affecting traffic light timings but you never know. For now drivers in Montgomery County will have to endure unsynchronized lights and slow moving traffic that causes drives that should take ten minutes to end up taking ten hours. In other words they will drive as if they are in Tysons Corner.