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New license plates raise new issues
Sunday, September 12, 1999 By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Transportation Writer
Heavy end-of-summer traffic, combined with breakdowns, minor accidents and construction, made commuting to Pittsburgh as miserable for me as it probably was for you last week.
You can't say you weren't warned. The headline on last Sunday's column read: "Traffic is about to take a turn for the worse."
While creeping along in bumper-to-bumper queues, with my frustration and car radiator nearing their boiling points, nasty thoughts crossed my mind: Pennsylvania Department of Ding-a-lings. Pittsburgh Department of Traffic Turkeys.
Gov. Ridge got me going Tuesday, the first day back to work after the Labor Day weekend. Ridge held a news conference to announce that the first 40,000 of the state's new blue-yellow-white license plates had been mailed.
He boasted they're the first plates in the world to feature a Web page address,www.state.pa.us. He said the plates "advertise our high-tech, high-energy 'New Pennsylvania' to the world."
Say what? Surely, the license plates we'll soon be seeing aren't meant to be symbolic of our roads and bridges, some of which haven't been fixed since computers were invented.
The current plates are already ensconced in the transportation record books, scoring two world "firsts" for the Old Pennsylvania -- ineptness and age.
When Ridge used "high-tech," I'm sure he didn't mean our Pittsburgh traffic-signal system, the most low-tech system of any urban region, adding unnecessary delays to commuting in the only state in the northeastern United States that doesn't own, maintain or control the lights on its highways.
When he used "high-energy," I hope Ridge wasn't referring to the low-energy PennDOT bureaucrats who were finally motivated to correct one of scores of lingering transportation shortcomings when they came up with new license plates.
Did his administration discover the "New Pennsylvania" while disposing of "America Starts Here," the former tourist promotion slogan? People who once asked, "It does?" can now wonder, "It is?"
I digress. But when we sit in traffic too long, when transportation inefficiencies make us prisoners of the road, minds wander. I had plenty of time to think about "Getting Around" items, but only so much time to write about them. Ergo.
Nobody -- not the city, police, Pirates, Alco Parking, PennDOT -- issued a news release warning commuters, who could have departed earlier for work or school, found alternate parking or rode public transit.
When it comes to transportation, Pittsburgh, as the region's hub, needs a single-source government or agency-sponsored "clearinghouse" to avoid such avoidable, inexcusable situations, whether it's a game day, race day or work day.
I thought I'd been crawling in traffic too long after seeing an advisory about new traffic patterns going into effect Sept. 11 and then Sept. 13. By Friday, the same sign had been changed a third time, to say the traffic patterns would now start Sept. 14. Guess you'll just have to wait and see.
It's the same 2.4-mile-long project where turnpike officials said in January that the contractor would be prohibited from interrupting traffic during rush hours. But either police or flaggers are stopping traffic every couple of minutes anyhow for trucks, workers, equipment and friends.
So much for turnpike credibility.
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Nobody else but Pennsylvania, and its prison workshops, has ever manufactured license plates whose reflective yellow coating peeled off and blue paint weathered away so soon, leaving 72-square-inch sheets of bare aluminum and Braille-like lettering that cops can almost see.