Few things in modern life are as frustrating to me as a red light when nothing is coming from the other three directions. I try to behave with patience and courtesy when driving around, but I struggle because of my proximity to traffic lights. Or, I struggled. In the last few months, something incredible happened to eliminate most stop lights from my immediate commute and it has brought considerable relief and joy.
It may seem rather unimportant to talk about stoplights, but only from the perspective of a person who didn't have to fuss with two fairly pesky lights multiple times per day. From the point of view of that person, traffic lights could be enough of a disruption of daily affairs to get the blood pressure dangerously elevated. Anytime things come to that level of emotion, it is worth talking about.
Most traffic lights are operated by the state department of transportation and have mechanisms in place that prevent them from staying stuck on one color for eons. Sometimes there is a weight sensor built into the street or some other contraption designed to make the transition from one side of traffic to another clean and fair. The two lights I am writing about were owned and operated by the city and have cycled through their three colors arbitrarily, facing the cardinal directions, uninterrupted and forgotten for decades.
These two sets of stoplights were a bane to those of us on our street and the intersecting roads, though, and here's why: there has never been enough traffic to justify a stoplight. Not ever. This fact affected me every day. Taking a left out of our driveway, I come to the first stoplight at a crossroad of our street, running north/south, and the intersecting street, running east/west. At this intersection, I turn left and head up the hill to the next four-way light, at which, depending on traffic, I take a right before turning left again at the back entrance to the library's parking lot.
You might say (and I would agree with you) how lucky I am to live so close to work. It has its benefits. A seven-minute, thirty-second amble on foot up to work or down the hill toward home at the end of a long day is a lovely thing. But I have been driving a lot recently because I have been concerned that our elderly pug has some incontinence issues. He does pretty well most days, but when he has to go, he has to go. I like to get home at or just past 11 and let him and our beagle, Lily, step outside while I pack some human kibble to take back with me. If the lights are in my favor, I can get home and back in less than 20 minutes, but only if the lights were in my favor. They never were.
Taking a right out of the back lot, the light is usually green, but by the time I get there, it has invariably switched to red. On the way back to work, pulling out of our driveway, the light at our corner is also almost always green. By the time I get there though, it has switched to red. It stays red for 4 minutes before it turns green again. Since I must make a left turn to go up the intersecting street, I have to wait. And guess what? There is rarely any traffic coming from the other way; nary a car in sight.
At the top of the hill, I can make a right on red easily enough and have done so several billion times, but coming back the other way, it was ever the same scenario. I had to wait out a long light with no other traffic in sight. If, in either case, I somehow miraculously made the green, invariably there would be a car or two coming the other direction that would prevent me from making my left before the light went red again. It happened regularly. The universe did not want me to sail through either of those lights.
You may ask why these lights were so bizarre and seemingly aware of my comings and goings and why they seemed to have it in for me. I have spent many hours at these red lights wondering the same. My only theory is that, since these are city-run lights, they developed something akin to sentience and decided that they really did not like me. The feeling was mutual.
The corner of our property makes up two sides of the south and west streets quadrant. In the time we have lived here, I have witnessed all kinds of stoplight-induced calamities and “near misses”. Police cruisers were the most frequent offenders, running red lights while rushing to the scenes of crimes and accidents. I was horrified on many occasions as cruisers nearly hit an oncoming vehicle while blowing through the light. During downpours or icy conditions, vehicles unable to stop careened through the lights causing fender benders and other hair-raising automotive nightmares. At the intersection up the hill, I have nearly been hit countless times by drivers from either direction who simply blow through the light while gazing at comments on their witty social media posts. One gets tired of almost dying as well as always being held up. So, I devoutly hoped that the council would eventually decide to remove the stoplights and install stop signs and make both intersections all-way stops.
It might be odd to wish for such things. I don't believe in prayer, even to the lesser traffic deities, but somehow my prayers were answered and I didn’t even have to make use of the public comment period at the council meeting.
In terms of major miracles, of which all ancient scriptures are full, Lazarus's walking out of the grave takes the cake as the big one. Modern-day miracles are nonexistent, but the Miracle of the Stoplights, as it will come to be called, is right up there with raising the dead. Nothing anyone says will change my mind about that.
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It all started about a year ago when a series of storms wreaked havoc across North Carolina and cut power to hundreds of thousands of residents. The power was out for about sixteen hours, in total for us. When the power came back on, the lights at both intersections were obviously messed up. It was a few weeks before the problem was addressed. In the meantime, the city put up temporary stop signs. At the closest intersection to us, the problem was resolved more quickly, and so it was business as usual for me every morning. However, the other intersection by the library briefly lost its ability to stop me on my way home. There was a slight learning curve for other drivers. They had grown used to not paying attention at a stoplight. Now, they had to learn how to not pay attention at a four-way stop. They eventually glommed on, but for me, it was utter joy. I actually found myself looking forward to getting to the intersection.
At about this time, my neighbor, who lives at the top of the hill by the other intersection, came to the library on some personal business and we were chatting about this and that when he casually dropped the news that the city was considering making the change permanent at both of our intersections. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I have often imagined the look on Mrs. Lazarus's face when hubby obediently came forth from his grave. I know exactly how she felt. Here was my long-awaited hope. If true, my life was about to be made, at least in terms of my commute to and from work.
But patience is one of those tough things for me. Like a parched wanderer in the desert, I had glimpsed an oasis. These things take time. The wheels of local government do not move quickly. Our small town has a relatively civil approach to politics, and being that we live in the South, there is a good deal more courtesy in these processes than at the state or national levels. Even something as small and meaningless as a brace of stoplights, speaking comparatively, eventually gets brought up and a motion made and seconded. The news that it was going to happen made the political machinations seem to take an eternity to me. By the time Yule rolled around I gave into the strong temptation to lose hope. In ill moods I muttered that maybe the neighbor's rumor had been just that. At each corner at the upper four-way, the lights had been fixed, meanwhile and the four temporary stop signs lay in the easements rusting and killing the city's grass. My hopes were seemingly dashed.
My mother’s habit of making me memorize Bible verses has filled my brain with Psalms and Proverbs and snippets of verse for daily situations. During this time, “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life,” rattled around in my otherwise empty cranium. It has a nice ring and it rang true, at least for my hope for stop signs. But I have grown cynical of late. My trust in elected individuals has paled. Voices of insanity, hysterical, power-hungry and mistakenly assuming that their way is the only way, have made things difficult for much progress at any level. I weighed going to a council meeting and putting in my “two pennies worth”, but knew that I would be just one more “resounding gong” or “clanging cymbal”.
The tenets of stoicism, as set down by Caesar Marcus Aurelius and Epicurus and others, suggest that I bear all with patience. The good emperor once asked, “Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.” There was nothing for it. I would have to grin and bear it, just like I bore the agonizingly slow red lights while cussing quietly under my breath and feeling fit for a brawl. I was pretty sure that these were the slings and arrows Hamlet was talking about.
Several weeks after Christmas, our local newspaper—the good one—had a small headline below the fold that proclaimed news about certain town traffic lights had been discussed at a council meeting, with more on page 8A. I hurriedly paged to 8A hoping to find good news. I didn’t, because it was actually printed on 7A, but, I finally found the small section. I’m not sure “more” was the right term to use, but there was some news.
The council had decided to save some cash by removing its own stoplights, agreeing that the intersections in question no longer needed lights to break up traffic. The sparse article clearly stated that the plan encompassed doing one intersection at a time and allowing several weeks between for drivers to adapt. Imagine my joy, when, within a few weeks, covered stop signs had been erected at all four points at both quadrants. It was the equivalent of wrapped presents under the Christmas tree with my name on them. Here were the first clues that what I had dearly hoped for would finally come true. Now, I had to muster patience for the day when they could be enjoyed.
Of course, the first intersection to be made a four-way stop was the furthest from our house. Well, that figured. I had to take a small victory and be grateful. But it was a qualified win. To not startle the local drivers, the city kept the red lights flashing, as per their notice in the paper. However, the flashing was somewhat frenetic, more like a strobe and it caused some issues.
Actually, chaos ensued. The fast blink confused so many people that on several occasions I had to swing my car alongside someone just sitting at the intersection, roll down my passenger side window and explain the situation to deeply confused and frightened drivers. After three near accidents, two squabbles where drivers left their cars to yell at other drivers and one situation where an elderly chap was just weeping copiously, I called the city. I figured my proximity and residence on the block in question gave me some authority to call and share the news.
The person at the city engineer's office heard my gripe and within a few days, they had adjusted the light to a more steady and evenly paced flash. I also used the opportunity to ask about when the other light (the one closest to our house) might get switched to flashing, but I got a cagey response. I hung up and hung my head. The terse reply from the engineering department was that it would be “a while”. Interestingly, though, the next day, as I came home to let the pups out, the city workers were out removing the covered stop signs and walking around in the road looking important and busy. It took real effort to restrain my urge to run up and hug every one of them.
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Lazarus had probably gotten used to the idea of being dead. He'd been in the grave for some little time when the call came through for him to ‘come forth’. Once he was up and moving groggily toward the crowd gathered outside, he may have had to recollect a few things before he got used to being alive again. I empathize with him. After years of dealing with the stoplights and being used to the traffic rules that they represent, it can be hard to adapt to new skills.
For the first few weeks I blew through the lights—after stopping for an appropriate period, of course—and it was glorious. Like all new things, though, the joy wore off quickly. The flashing lights now feel like training wheels. I am ready for them to be switched off and removed. After all, most people who use the intersections regularly are up to speed (so to speak) on the changes. Having stop signs and flashing lights is silly. How long do people need to get used to the idea? It’s not like the folks who use these intersections regularly haven’t figured it out by now.
My own problem has been somewhat less explainable. Now, every time I arrive at a red stoplight, I stop, look both ways, and then get ready to go, before hurriedly stamping on the brakes again as I remember that I have to wait until it changes to green. This has happened several times. Luckily, there was no representative of the police present to see my stupidity.
Even with the blinking lights, though, the sheer luxury of being able to move quickly through a quiet crossroad is very nice. I would have assumed that most people locally felt the same way. That changed when Micki read me some words of frustration from one of our local leaders who was extremely exorcized by the new situation. This man and his family live in our neighborhood, too, but not close enough to call neighbors, not that I would employ the term even if he lived next door. He was very unhappy about the new four-way stops and was using his power, such as it is, to try to undo the council's changes. I cautiously admit that the online screaming done by this person enhanced my joy of stop signs tenfold.
And, it turns out that schadenfreude was exactly the condiment I needed to more fully savor our neighborhood’s new traffic freedoms. My commute time has been reduced considerably and it gives me no end of joy to know that the local “Right Honorable” is in misery, too. Few things can be as enlivening as knowing that a scoundrel is having a bad day, unless you add stop signs where stop lights once were to the menu.
So there's the saga. While seemingly trivial, it serves as a testament to the small victories that can bring unexpected joy. What began as a daily source of frustration transformed into a symbol of triumph, a tangible representation of bureaucratic change working in favor of the common person. The removal of the lights not only streamlined my commute but also provided a much-needed antidote to the cynicism that often creeps into daily life. More than just a traffic issue, this experience underscored the power of patience, the occasional absurdity of local politics (and politicians), and the simple pleasure of seeing a long-held desire fulfilled. It's a reminder that even in the face of modern frustrations, a little bit of change, even something as silly as changing stoplights to stop signs, can make a world of difference.
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