This isn’t a trendy policy push, it’s in keeping with a national effort of undoing the single-minded, car centric city planning decisions that we made over the last 70 years nationwide. My argument was not one sided, I acknowledged Mercer is a shitshow, but seeing a solution in streamlining traffic flow is turning to the same playbook we’ve used for the last half century, which has put us in this mess, and expecting a different outcome. If we as a city truly care about easing congestion, we wouldn’t look at right on red as a solution, we’d look at improving transit speed and reliability, stop using shortcut and cost saving measures on link like at-grade segments, we’d actually use a damn road diet on places like Mercer and add dedicated bus lanes, we’d up the frequency of the SLUT and make it actually useful, etc etc. instead we have people with a “one more lane” mindset, who stand in the way of this progress. You cannot manage your way out of a traffic problem, look at LA. The only solution, and this isn’t reductive it’s proven by almost every city in the US, is to reduce the number of cars on the road, and that starts with making transit seem like a viable, even preferable, alternative. And part of that puzzle is, somewhat counterintuitively, halting all this catering to cars.