Some Drivers Don't Need a Red Light Camera 4560

It's the proverbial slippery slope, though. At the bottom of said slopeis a habit of red-light running. Aside from the basic rudeness of it (a lot of drivers were home sick from kindergarten the day they went over "waiting your turn"), sooner or later it's going to get you a big ticket... or a pedestrian splayed across your hood, or a T-bone with somebody who was a bit too incautious and aggressive with *his* green light.

What I was taught was that intersections are where things happen, and light transitions are when they are most likely to happen, and that's why habits such as running pink lights and speeding up on the yellow to make the light are bad ideas.

Again, I freely concede that apparently distracted and inattentive SUV driver was not doing a very good job. California's law says that you stop for the yellow light "when safe." If the result had been an accident rather than a near-miss, this might have resulted in an exception to the usual rule of thumb that the guy behind is gonna get blamed in a rear-ender.

However, without someone like the original poster to serve as a witness, he might have been caught in a "his word against her word" situation... and it still would have all come down to a series of judgement calls by overworked and sometimes all too human officials.

The SUV driver might also have made a compelling argument that she didn't even see anyone behind her, depending on the relative sizes of the vehicles and how closely he was tailgating. Many's the time I've been tailgated so insanely that I wondered if the guy was trying to hook his bumper over my trailer hitch to save gas.

And I say again that if the driver ahead thinks the light is too dark a shade of yellow to enter the intersection, the driver behind isn't likely to find that it has gotten any greener by the time he gets there. (Never mind the possibility that the driver ahead saw something that the driver behind didn't see and perhaps couldn't have seen, in addition to the state of the traffic signal, which influenced the decision to stop. )

In the San Francisco area, some substantial number of signal-controlled intersections very near a busy entrance or exit ramp have been painted with white crosshatching and equipped with signs reading, "Don't Block The Box" and a threat of, as I recall, a $271 fine. The idea is that you shouldn't plunge into the intersection without reasonable hope that there would be somewhere to go on the other side. Enforcement and compliance are both sporadic.

In the mid-80s, I worked in a building that overlooked such an intersection, very near an often-clogged approach to the Bay Bridge. For those of us who walked or rode to the office, it was fun in an instructive and horrifying sort of way to stand at the window after our Friday-evening company-sponsored atbreastude adjustment and watch this unfold.

In the early parts of the commute, motor cops would sit nearby, occasionally whipping out their ticket books to convince someone that, yes, the fine print on the sign read "this means you." Once in a great while a cop would stand in the middle of the intersection and actually direct traffic, but I guess ticketing was more, well, lucrative.

Their watch ended at 6 p.m., and by about, oh, 6:03 (enough time for a change or two of the light), especially in bad weather or a getaway weekend, it was more like watching one of those nature shows about baboons. Once in a great while we even observed not a mere clogged intersection but genuine gridlock -- the tragedy of the commons unfolding in such a geometry that most people could not maneuver even out of benighted self-interest.

Naturally the result was that people who had no intention of getting onto the bridge, but just wanted to go about their business on the surface streets, were pretty much hosed.

Those among us who had to get out of the parking lot and onto the bridge (or, on a bad night, even *through* this bumper-to-bumper morbutt of petty inhumanity) didn't find it amusing at all, of course. It was not at all uncommon to hit the leftover pizza or Chinese takeout in the break room and just go back to work until it all finally cleared up and calmed down.

--Joe