Commuters who pulled up to the intersection at E. 12th Street and 16th Avenue in Oakland, CA were treated to an odd sight last week. All the traffic lights at the intersection had been removed and the city replaced them by hanging four-way stop signs in their place. It’s just the latest sign that California has descended into a Third World hell hole after decades of majority Democrat rule.
Neighbors and business owners around the intersection say the problem stems from a massive nearby homeless camp. Thieves continuously break open a city electrical box and steal the copper wiring out of it, which either disables the traffic lights completely or leaves a blinking red light. There have even been some serious accidents at the intersection because the lights are never working.
Every time the city comes out and fixes the electrical box, some fentanyl addict who is living the dream comes along and steals the copper wiring again within a day or two. The city initially tried putting a couple of concrete blocks on top of the junction box, but you can guess how well that worked as a deterrent.
Neighbors say that the only way to really prevent the problem would be to remove the massive homeless encampment, which stretches along the sidewalk from 17th to 14th Avenue. That’s not a proposal that has occurred to the Oakland City Council, however.
The city’s current solution is to simply abandon the taxpayersby ripping out the stop lights and replacing them with stop signs. Why fix a problem when you can simply ignore it? The city claims that it does eventually plan to put the stoplights back up, but hasn’t given locals any kind of a timeline for when that could happen.
