Monthly Archive for July, 2012

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City Pondering Problem Homeless People Downtown

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 9, 2012 in Crime. 19 Comments

The city is having a tough time figuring out what to do about a small number of problematic homeless people downtown, Graham Moomaw wrote in the Daily Progress on Saturday. There are a few homeless people, most apparently not locals (unlike most of the area’s homeless population), who engage in drunken fights and nasty panhandling downtown, and downtown business owners are sick of it. It’s particularly problematic around Central Place. In response, the city has removed the benches from that block and stationed a police officer there on weekdays. As the owner of Zocalo told City Council, the problem isn’t homelessness, it’s people actually violating the law.

This reminds me of the periodic demands to beef up the city’s noise ordinance. It’s always in response to a single restaurant or venue that’s behaving badly, but because a law can’t target just one venue, we’ve got to talk about laws that affect everybody.

Pantops Equipped with Intelligent Traffic Lights

Published by Waldo Jaquith on July 9, 2012 in Transportation. 13 Comments

Some clever new traffic signals have been installed along 250 on Pantops Mountain, Courtney Beale writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow. They’re Rhythm Engineering’s InSync traffic signal controllers, which use video cameras and a small computer to tally the rate of traffic on both streets at an intersection and, in collaboration with nearby traffic signals that are similarly equipped, adapts the light timing to get the most cars through the intersection as efficiently as possible. Technologically, it’s no fancier than the standard hardware in an Xbox 360, but the application of this concept to a $30,000 traffic light controller stands to save a lot of people a lot of time. Beale doesn’t say exactly which intersections are now equipped with an InSync controller, but since VDOT’s impetus for the change was the move of Martha Jefferson, presumably it includes the major three intersections between the intersection with 20 and the turn for Martha Jefferson.

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