Sometimes heavy traffic is a good thing. At the mid-year point, JLF web traffic has been solid. We had about 78,000 visits to our sites in June, with about 200,000 page views and 39,000 unique visitors. That’s up 90 percent, 61 percent, and 77 percent respectively from June 2005. For the 2nd Quarter 2006 as a whole, we are up 77 percent in visits from 2005, 71 percent in page views, and 59 percent in unique visitors. Also heartening is that JohnLocke.org and CarolinaJournal.com, while still dominating the traffic, do not make up quite so overwhelming a share. In 2005, they were about 90 percent of the traffic. Now, they are about 80 percent. Our regional blogs (Charlotte’s MeckDeck and Wilmington’s SquallLines) have helped a lot on this score. These regional sites allow for more focused opinions and news briefs.  Look for overall JLF traffic to increase as more regional blog sites are added later this year. Lest we forget that too much traffic can be a bad thing, Michael Sanera, in a letter to the News & Observer, reminds us that traffic calming measures – such as speed bumps and humps – lead to slower response time for emergency vehicles. Trying to find the right balance between the need for speed and the need for safety is a tricky problem for city planners.