Letters to the editor:
[email protected]

Stick to the Food

I am writing in regard to the review of the Wasabi restaurant [Restaurant Rover, Oct. 17]. While I completely understand that a restaurant critic must have a scathing insight, I never realized that it would apply to the patrons. I feel that the review of the patrons of the restaurant was unkind as well as cruel. I find it curious that she appointed herself the mass interpreter of human physical appearances while leaving herself and Heinrich absent from the description. Please, stick to criticizing the food in the future and save the negative spin on good people for your own personal, rather than public, pleasure.

Brenda Starwalt
Knoxville

Lighten Up!

As we look forward to another spate of relatively unfettered road construction, this time on Alcoa Highway and Kingston Pike ["Strange Harmony," Sept. 26] I would like to introduce the state Highway Commission to a quintessential American idea: do more with less. Why rebuild a road when all you may need is a few new traffic lights?

The first one was installed in London in the late 19th century to control the passage of pedestrians, horse-drawn wagons, and buggies. Two Americans invented the traffic light we know today somewhat simultaneously, in Detroit and Cleveland, in the early 1920s. A Detroit police officer fashioned his light after those used as railroad signals. Garrett Morgan of Cleveland, perhaps the first African American to own an automobile, invented the first "four-way" signal. I propose that the State Highway Commission no longer use "in house" traffic engineers to solve their problems and out-source to consultants who know something of the history of traffic lights and other "traffic calming techniques."

In-house traffic engineers invariably seem to solve their problems with large earth moving equipment and a few million yards of concrete and steel. This symptom is similar to that of the surgeon who, if left to his or her own devices, tends to solve most problems with a scalpel rather than physical therapy, diet, or pharmaceuticals. Outside consultants may help explain, in very simple English, how more inventive and smaller-scaled engineering solutions can improve the quality of life for those who live on two legs and, at times, four wheels. Among these modest and proven solutions are well-placed traffic signals and "traffic calming" techniques.

Rather than creating invasive public works projects, years of snarled traffic, the demolition of houses (many of which are of historical significance), the relocation of utilities, inevitable delays, and cost overruns, these smaller solutions tend not to speed up the flow of vehicles, but rather to slow it down. Simple and inexpensive, these techniques have helped improve the quality of life in many American cities, raising the land value, lowering driver anxiety, and lessening unnecessary construction and capital spending.

Moreover, the traffic signal is a singularly American invention. During these difficult months of homeland security and debates about how best to destroy "the cradle of civilization" known today as Iraq, what better way for us to celebrate the red, white, and blue, than by installing a few well-placed yellow boxes of red, yellow, and green? While not all may gesture with a patriot salute as they stop at these newly installed traffic signals or navigate around the "calming devices," over time, the slower, gentler traffic in Knoxville may have a civilizing effect on us all.

George Dodds
Knoxville