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Cape May County Traffic Yields To John McCarthy's Directions

Bv BanNra Mctiler RIO GRAfmK—Signs, signal!}, and markings are the tools of John McCarthy's trade ■ As traffic engineer for the Department of Transportation, McCarthy's charges include stop signs, traffic lights and yellow lines But working with transportation signals is not as simple as it may sound Did you know, for instance, that one of those so annoying traffic lights may cost as much as $26,000, or that an ordinary red and white $50 stop sign must have its existence justified hy a state bureau before it can be planted at an intersection ? And then there arc the roads The difficulty comes when trying tV) determine which of the avements belong to which ureaucracy In Cape May, for example,

Franklin Street is a municipal road, for which the city is responsible to sign and mark according to their own rules. Beach Drive is a county road, marked and signed according to county regulations, and Route 109, which winds its way past the Ixtbster House, is a state road, whose authorized markings must come from the state. Then there’s the Parkway, which is signed by the New Jersey Highway, and US 9 to the Ferry, under title of the Delaware Bridge Authority. And the Ocean Drive bridges belong to the bridge commission Part of McCarthy's job is the sorting out of the 21 agencies that control the roads in Cape May County, It may appear confusing, but McCarthy has come up with a simple solution: Uniformity. “If every agency in the county established its own standards for

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signs and markings,” said McCarthy, sifting through the various traffic manuals piled high on his desk at the County Airport office, "it would be very confusing." One intersection in Wildwood, he elaborated, joins a city street, a county road, and a state highway. It is that close juxtaposition of the various authorities that creates a need for uniformity. That is why stop signs are always red ana white, despite the location. “We don’t let people put blue and gold stop signs up if that happens to be their school colors,” joked the 30-year-old engineer. McCarthy is responsible not only for deciphering which agency gives authority for signs and markings, but also for procuring the authorization for signs. When someone requests a sign, he continued, the procedure is much more complex than reaching into the truck of his car. First he must evaluate conditions, determine if the sign is actually needed, the sign's effect on the local industries: fishing, research, farming, and tourist travelers, and then prepare the documents which are submitted to the Trenton office. Every week the Tretiton Transportation Bureau sends an out-of-town driver to the county to evaluate McCarthy’s charges, as a sort of first-hand test of what a tourist might experience on county roads, and to see if what is being marked in Cape May County is consistent with what is marked across the state. Whether one drives here or in

Essex County, where McCarthy grew up, the signs will be the same, he said. Even no passing zones and the distance between speed limit signs will be similar. McCarthy’s signs receive varying priorities. Replacing a stop sign that has been knocked down or stolen comes first, he explained. Second is regulation or warning signs, usually black and yellow, such as a slippery when wet sign, and third are the courtesy signs, the white on green guide signs used for exit markings. If a crew enroute to placing an exit marking discovers an uprooted stop sign, he explained, that gets taken care of first because of safety needs. The different colored signs serve different purposes. "Red alerts the- driver to something they need to know immediately,” said McCarthy. Green and white signs are noticed only if you’re looking for them. There are many shoulds, shalls and mays, involved in signing, McCarthy continued. “A street sign should be green and white," he explained. “A stop sign shall be red and white, and you may put up street signs.” McCarmy's job also involves removing unneeded signals and signs. In the two years that McCarthy has been on the job, North Wildwood has gone from having 79 traffic signals to having 26.y In Wildwood there were '100 signals. The department of transportation found a need for 68. McCarthy, has attended a lot of meetings With city councils over

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