Ok let’s change the headline up a bit: California father arrested after erasing crosswalk paint and taking down stop signs from near the children’s park.
That is not what the article describes at all.
A city representative said officials reviewed the intersection after receiving concerns from Brandlin and determined it did not meet the requirements for a four-way stop but added pedestrian striping to improve safety.
Brandlin spent about $1,000 of his own money on commercial-grade materials, including 30-inch reflective stop signs matching the other ones on the street. He began installing them himself to replace the yellow posted crosswalk signs on the intersection in the early morning of March 14, according to the El Segundo Police Department.
Police arrested him around 1:30 a.m. while he worked on the second direction of traffic. Brandlin said the arrest was excessive, saying he was cited with multiple charges, including felonies.
People should not be misusing public property in contravention of the law.
What good does changing the headline do?
OG says repaints
New one would say essentially removed paint.
Good. (Downvote me all you want)
If you let everyone design their local traffic flow it will be impossible to go anywhere. That’s worse than everyone deciding if they want low-income housing or a safe injection site in their neighborhood.
The intersection was already a 2-way stop and, given the street topology and level of service, changing it to an all-way stop is benign.
The concern I have is that part of the charges include painting the crosswalk where one already exists. That’s not “design[ing] their local traffic flow,” but following up with expected public works. Granted he painted a ladder design rather than a standard continental pattern, but you should probably just shut the fuck up in the future.
A car-brained, embarrassing comment.
The safety of children is more important than the speed you’re able to drive to Krispy Kreme Donuts. If the government doesn’t address it, the people will. You barking about traffic flow is irrelevant and I do not care.
Yeah, people also don’t want high-speed rail going past their house or whatever.
If the government doesn’t address it, the people will.
Good luck with that. Most people like cars a lot more than I do.
Our own neighborhoods don’t belong to us.
The city ultimately determined the intersection did not meet the required traffic volume for additional stop signs,
It shouldn’t be about how much traffic there is. If people are going too fast and/or there’s a visibility issue and/or there’s danger of kids walking into the street, there needs to be a stop sign because that actually slows people down and makes it safer for everyone involved. Even my carbrain understands that.
The panthers used to get stop lights put in in weeks that localities had been refusing calls from for years. You want to do stuff like this, get organized. And not dancing in frog suits organized, militant, community focused organized with educational programs and childcare for your community.
Anarchism meets the state.
Direct action and taking charge of the change you want to see is great, states fucking things up because they’re not the ones in power is pathetic.
Yeah what could possibly go wrong if we just let every Tom, Dick and Harry with no knowledge or experience in any of this, to just put up traffic signs anywhere they want?
Surely that goes both ways right? There’s a stop sign by my house that I don’t like, so I’m going to just remove it. Fuck the state, right?
There’s a difference between lone individuals tearing out stop signs and a neighborhood collectively deciding to install one near a park.
Yeah, it’s called a city council
Real “If we let gay people get married, soon people will be marrying their hamsters” energy
It’s really not that at all, but go off
It really is. Slippery slope fallacy. Letting one neighborhood collectively decide to make an intersection by a park safer for children to cross is not the same as letting all people make their own decisions regarding signs and intersections. We are capable of handling individual situations as context-sensitive instead of assuming universal application is the only option.
It’s not slippery slope, it’s literally the same law. You can’t just add or remove signs on a whim.
Huh, always weird when I see local news on my Lemmy feed.
FYI, South Bay is especially car brained, even my LA. We have a major refinery, some car manufacturer HQs, and I’m pretty sure more mechanics per capita than most of Cali. Long history with the automotive industry going back to the founding of a lot of these little cities.
It’s a shame, too. The beach cities are lovely places to walk and somehow have terrible biking and public transportation infrastructure. The people there can be a bit entitled, though (and it’s it just me or did this guy do it right outside his fucking home? Lol). But I don’t know a solution, it’s practically every other day someone is mowed down 'round here by a muscle car, and the areas East of El Segundo have a lot more waking families since we can’t afford cars.
A little hope, though. I saw they mentioned the Sawtelle area too. I used to live there, and not only did they 180 on that case, Stoner Park is now surrounded by mini roundabouts. So change does happen after this type of thing, and their jurisdiction is LA itself, not a smaller city in a city.
imo if you are going to start changing how the road is, start blocking it or start damaging the road to force a speedbump or hole. It’s a lot cheaper than spending 1000$ on a sign they can easily just take down, a lot faster and less likely to get caught in the act.
That seems counterproductive because it just antagonizes people. His method blends in with the rest of the road and will likely gain much better compliance from drivers.
I agree but, thats sort of the point. The first alternative is a lot of money that takes a bunch of time to setup, just for the city to very cheaply and quickly reverse it. They had already /tried/ that approach and the city said no, doing it themselves was just a bad plan to begin with.
The city at the moment is out maybe 20 minutes to take the sign down, and then can go back to sticking their head in the sand.
A damaged road? can take weeks to months to fix, and requires a dedicated crew and equipment, all while forcing vehicles to slow down due to it, while using tools that are likely just laying about the garage. Don’t take me wrong, both methods are super illegal, but, one is morally bad, cheap and hard to fix, where one is morally good, expensive, time consuming and easily fixed.
Our local playground has no traffic signs (aside from a playground sign) and a very faded crosswalk, but everyone knows to slow way down before reaching it because if they don’t the potholes(winter kills the roads) will make them regret it.
The town “fixes” it every few years or so.
I just think this guy’s approach is king because he put in a ton of time and effort to do it right with expensive materials, has a very sympathetic cause, and has all of the public and media on his side with the city looking like unreasonable bad guys. Another example of this is the guy who updated a freeway sign (also in CA) to better show the upcoming split and was never caught. He waited until the statute of limitations ran out and published the story of himself doing it online
When you start tearing up the road that you and your neighbors use daily, people are going to turn on you and make you a pariah which not only hurts yourself but also your cause. I bet you this man’s charges get dropped and the city will cave to get some good PR with very little effort.
Now for places with a shit ton of potholes and bad roads, I think spray painting dicks or other vulgar things on them is very effective vandalism because the examples out there show that the city/county will be quick to correct the issue and everyone has a laugh about it.
Yea i get what you mean. Also I know what case you are talking about I think, That was the case where they never even noticed he did it until he said something right? I saw a youtube video on that a year or two ago.
And once someone (probably a child) gets hit and dies, the city will say how sorry this tragedy is… will claim they’ll do something, and then do nothing. Because words are cheap. Oh, and they’ll act like this wasn’t avoidable, there was no way to know this kind of thing could happen.
will claim they’ll do something, and then do nothing.
How would they possibly benefit from not doing anything about it in that situation? Your local municipal government isn’t necessarily out to get you dude, it’s usually made up mostly of normal people who want to do whats best for their community.
If you feels so strongly about this, why don’t you run for city council?
I know, why don’t you got to ONE fucking city council meeting?
Just install these instead:
hey that’s cheating. that was how i crossed busy streets when i was walking home from undergrad.
i had a bright neon painted metal water bottle. I would raise it and make eye contact. just like that. like, this is mine, but it can be yours. you don’t know if it weighs an ounce or 5 pounds. stops traffic remarkably well, especially considering the law and the sign everyone ignored right above my head said “stop for pedestrians”.
yes, i did have a death wish you don’t need to ask. living in utah does that to you when you’ve seen life on the outside.
Is Utah that bad? It’s at the top of so many lists. I could imagine the people being the biggest problem, though.
it was, yeah.
there is incentive to game those lists. they are… what is the word… tourism? advertisement? other places don’t have as much riding on gaming those lists as utah does. it’s not their religion that looks bad when it’s not #1.
Brb, adding a bike lane to the nearest stroad
That Park’s revenue is negative. Sir, don’t you see? The shareholders!
The city ultimately determined the intersection did not meet the required traffic volume for additional stop signs
For the record, this is 100% a lie. Every single warrant document (list of criteria) used by an engineer will have two magic words written at the bottom of the list:
“Engineering judgement.”
That means there is no such thing as a “required traffic volume” for a stop sign or any other kind of signal or marking. If the engineer, in his professional judgement, agrees that one is warranted, it’s warranted.
Engineers who hide behind things like warrants, pretending their hands are tied by them, are cowards and aren’t doing their jobs properly.
The city engineer who refused to approve the stop sign didn’t want to approve it because he cared more about drivers’ convenience than he did children’s safety, but was too chickenshit to tell it to the dad’s face.
There is usually some guidance, although the regulations are usually written with more wiggle room than structural standards because of varying site conditions.
However, the hill causing an increase to the speed of the car and that the area has a known pedestrian draw to it would tip the scales more towards installing a stop sign.
There are stop signs in the middle of nowhere Ohio, where there’s literally a few cars on the road a day. I don’t see how volume should come into play when you’re next to a playground.
Yeah here in WI too. Like on 55mph state highways in the literal middle of nowhere, as in the intersection is corn fields on every quadrant.
Its weird, but of course I stop. Im only ever stopping for the corn, but I aint trying to have some cop come flying out of the corn and tear my ass up either lol
Even if the vehicle traffic didn’t meet some imaginary quota, that says nothing of the pedestrian traffic. Just another signal of our car-centric society.
That’s typically one of the warrants. In addition to vehicle, bicycle, and pedestrian volumes, other warrants include things like vehicle approach speed, sight distance, and crash statistics.
If 50 people sign a petition, you don’t need to do a study. Just put in the fucking stop sign.
Weird that in one photo the stop marking is in negative, and the next photo the stop marking is white?
Seems to me like the photos aren’t trustworthy. Which again cast doubt on the whole story.I think the one photo is showing a stencil taped down and coned off prior to applying the white paint.
Yes you are probably right, weird that they didn’t write that in the text.
Weird that in one photo the stop marking is in negative, and the next photo the stop marking is white?
The first photo is of the stencil, the second is from after it’s been painted.
I don’t have a problem with this.
Random people don’t get to decide where stop signs go and do not go.
How about if someone just decided to remove a stop sign.
He’s not a random person, he’s a resident of the neighborhood where he made the change. City officials and this alleged traffic engineer would be considered the “random people” here as they have absolutely zero stake in any of this.
City officials and this alleged traffic engineer would be considered the “random people” here
It’s literally their fucking job dude, what are you talking about.
Why are they an “alleged” traffic engineer? Because you don’t like what they did?
So what if it’s their job when they clearly aren’t doing it and have no connection to the neighborhood? This is a lame appeal to authority fallacy.
Some random official and random engineer checks some bad plans and paperwork and claims “stop signs and crosswalks aren’t needed” so we should just automatically defer to their decision despite the residents who actually live at and use this intersection overwhelmingly claiming the exact opposite? That’s utter nonsense.
I say alleged traffic engineer because they’re claiming they performed a traffic study at this intersection despite residents claiming to see zero evidence of this being performed, but I guess you believe job titles automatically bestow someone with unimpeachable honesty and integrity. A city official made the claim so it must be accurate and true.
How about if someone just decided to remove a stop sign.
Are those 2 situations equivalent at all? I can’t think of a situation where adding a stop sign up would make the intersection more dangerous whereas the removal of one would almost certainly make it more dangerous. In your mind is the only way to regulate this to ban both for some reason?
Traffic control is a massive issue that involves numerous factors beyond “danger”.
So yes you can not have random entities making those decisions, There has to be a single governing body.
I agree, just addressing your hypothetical at the end and how that doesn’t follow logically.
Unfortunately, yes, they have to “punish” this.
But it’s still a great publicity stunt that has now gotten the eyes of many people, a new petition on the matter would likely gather a lot more support.
The cops don’t care if the stop sign wasn’t there. They’ll give you a ticket anyway.
While yes, you get out of the ticket if you prove the sign was missing at the time of the infraction.
Edit: Just don’t give them any attitude or they’ll arrest you for resisting arrest.
car drivers would learn to be more careful and less selfish
I prefer selfish car drivers; they’re predictable. I’m fine with them stopping only because there’s a stop sign. When a car driver decides to be “nice” and gestures for me to go, that’s when I get concerned.
selfish car drivers certainly aren’t predictable as they break laws already inplace
If they’re ignoring the law, then the sign isn’t changing their behavior.
Its quota season.
