The Sweet Face of DelDOT Responding to a Delaware Resident Request

Steve Treut, (pronounced like “troyt”) is a SIGNAL CONSTRUCTION/MAINTENANCE MANAGER, in the Trans Sol-Traffic-Systems Maintenance & Construction Department of DelDOT.  He and Rob Kern, a SIGNAL MAINTENANCE TECHNICIAN for the same department arrived at the stroke of 1:30 PM on May 20th just as I was pulling up on my bike where they would troubleshoot a traffic light sensor that would not respond to a bicycle at 273 and Brownleaf Road in Newark.

The result of this sensor failure was that cyclists are trapped inside the Birchwood Park subdivision with no safe way to cross the very busy 273 highway, because our bikes wouldn’t trip the sensor to change the traffic signal to green and we were forced to either spend the rest of our life waiting at the intersection or hold our breath and charge across the highway against a red traffic signal and hope that we survive.

I had filed the “highway trouble” report on DelDOT’s handy website that makes it easy for Delaware citizens to quickly alert DelDOT to road problems that need to be addressed.

Steve is one of the nicest guys you ever want to meet.  He asked me to be present for their repair call so that we could test out the sensor with my bike.

 Rob was just as nice in the level of attention he brought to this problem and reminded me of my electronics repairman father who furrowed his brown and bent to the task of troubleshooting a problem and who could tune out everything else around him.  Like my father also, you could tell Rob was a bit of a worrier who feared the aging sensor that had been in the pavement for quite some time might just be beyond repair.

 If that turned out to be the case, it would require about $3000 of replacement parts and a major overhaul of the asphalt section to replace the wires and sensor.  Given the budgetary constraints facing all departments of Delaware government that could mean a delay of a year or more before the repairs could be done.

This news furrowed my brow as well and also the brow of Rachel, a cyclist friend of mine who came to cheer the process on.

Rob fiddled with wires, tested a thing or two, drummed his fingers on the electronics box and fiddled with things again.  I began to pace.  The scene began to take on the appearance of family members outside an operating room pacing back and forth and wondering if their loved one would survive.

“She’s not working,” intoned Rob.  I sighed and paced some more and to occupy my mind, I took about 40,000 photos of Steve and Rob, cranking my telephoto lens all the way out to see just how much detail I could wring out of my Pentax 14.6 megapixel dslr camera.

We heard, “Still not working” a few more times from Rob.  By this point even the unflappable Rachel began to pace.

I’m certain that in a former life, Steve was either Socrates, a college Philosophy professor, or the best Vaudeville song and dance man on the planet.  I think, more than anything, in order to distract us from our hand-wringing, Steve began to talk about his family, his Father who was a POW, the mechanics of traffic signals, the price of tomatoes, how my neighbors kept circling around us in their cars wondering what on earth we were doing.  And boy oh boy can that man do a mean soft shoe dance!

 Rob sighed again as if it was the end and our patient was dead on the operating table.  And then he smiled and said, “But I did bring this little thing along, just in case.”

It was a newer model of the old printed circuit board in the sensor control box.  The theory was it just might have enough more “juice” to bring the sensor back to life.

Well that moved us all into action.  Rachel was poised on her bike ready to ride over the trip wire upon command.  I was shooting thousands of photos to memorialize the event; and Steve had his hand folded behind his back, leaning over just a bit like a baseball umpire with a grin on his face.

Ooops.  Bad start out of the box.  The neighbors were still circling us in their cars, surveying us and tripping the wire with their cars.  Steve laughed and said, “I just may have to put up a roadblock to clear the place out.”

Second try was the charm.  Rob said, “IT SAW HER!”  He actually looked astonished and repeated the test several times.  Then we sent Rachel across the street to make sure the trip wire on the Pilgrim Garden subdivision side was working too.

Like me, Rachel uses this intersection multiple times a day on her bike, so I believe she was pausing here to say a little prayer that the sensor on the other side of the road was now also working properly.

And there she blows after tripping the sensor.

The patient is going to live after all.  Glory Be.

Before he left, Professor Steve gave us a little lecture on the care and feeding of aging sensor wires and how to have the best chance to trip them if they are being ornery.

“Now, Caroline, the run you made was interesting”. He was being very kind in trying to get across to me that you don’t trip the wires by riding on top of them….you have the best chance of tripping them by riding in the middle of the box or diagonally across the corners.

I never can quite figure out where the wires are so I tend to stagger my bike down the box trying to hit as many rows of lines as possible.  I’m sure from the rear it must have looked like I was either more disabled than I claim to be or I was intoxicated.

Steve drew diagrams on his imaginary chalkboard marking the best point to pass over with your bike.  I took notes because I have a feeling he’ll be emailing me a test on the information.

Rachel and I actually hated to see Steve and Rob drive away.  It was a successful service call and a delightful opportunity to see such positive representatives  of DelDOT personnel taking an interest in assisting Delaware residents and, you know, I’m certain they enjoyed the experience as well.  That’s the thing about kindness, and compassion, some humor, and the desire to do a good job.  It’s synergistic and comes back to us magnified.

A teddy bear for Michael, one of a few dozen mementos left in his memory.

Michael Gropp died at this intersection a little over a month ago.  His tragic death that rocked the world of our Birchwood Park/Fox Chase subdivision was the result of someone, never apprehended, who was drag racing down 273, ran the traffic light and struck Michael as he was walking his girlfriend home to the other side of 273.

Not one of us at the sensor fix meeting brought up his name or looked in the direction of his roadside memorial.  There is still no way to adequately process the senseless death of a child.  And yet, of course, his presence was heavy in the air.

His death was not a result of the faulty sensor, he was a pedestrian, not a cyclist.  But it does remind us that there is still so much to be done to make our roads safer by providing pedestrian cross walks and countdown crossing lights at the very least.

Delaware is in an interesting position by being small enough to make forward movement faster and less bogged down with layers upon layers of strangers distanced from one another.  We also are one of the few states where bicycle advocates and government officials are forming first-name basis positive alliances without adversarial undertones. 

We have a stellar Governor in Jack Markell, a cyclist himself, who will not rest until his Executive Order No 6 to improve traffic conditions for pedestrians and cyclists is fully realized.  All the pieces are here we just have to move them into place.

Having a traffic sensor fixed will not bring Michael Gropp back to us but it is one thing we can do.  Followed by another thing.  We can never know the full effect of the changes we help bring about.

At our recent Delaware Bike Summit on May 21st, I was talking to someone who described a revelation he had that rocked him to his core.  He had been advocating for years to help get the bicycle helmet law passed that required children under 16 to wear a bicycle helmet.

What struck him suddenly was that through his efforts that were sometimes boring to do, sometimes incredibly frustrating, he realized that there are children alive now who wouldn't be if they had sustained a traumatic head injury from not wearing a bike helmet.

For me, the intersection at 273 and Brownleaf Road is ground zero.  Today we now have an operational traffic signal sensor.  Soon we will have pedestrian crosswalks and countdown crossing signals.  Farther down the road the speeding motorist issues will be addressed.  And after that the entire 273 corridor will be safe enough for the disabled, the children, the cyclists, the senior citizens to travel it and someday, long after I'm dead and gone, there may be a teenager named Michael as well, who walked his girlfriend home at night and returned home alive because of some boring detail I did for pedestrian and bicycle advocacy.

The same kinds of feelings drives our government officials.  They must demand much of us as citizens to do our part and we must demand of them the same thing.  That is an alliance that can't be vanquished.