Near my house there are a set of pelican crossings, traffic lights with red, green and amber lights and a jolly old green man to let pedestrians cross when the fancy takes them. The purpose of my rant today is not that these lights are near my house, it's more how they seem to hate the pedestrian and worship the car.
Some common sense notions to get things rolling. First off, some crossing have lights that will change to red when a pedestrian presses the green man provided a certain amount of time has passed; other will let people cross after a certain period of time. The latter is what I am faced with nearby. Secondly, the green man is meant to be up with the traffic lights red for a certain period of time to allow people to cross and ensure that the road is clear for the traffic flow to continue. Right, now these facts have been established I can get on with moaning.
Too many time I have been stood at those lights waiting to cross. The road they find themselves placed on is very busy one, connecting a supermarket to the main roads that run through the town. Yet I never expected to find myself wasting 5 - 10 minutes of my life every other day feeling like a chicken in a bad joke. At time I have found myself there long enough to notice that each of the three junctions has been from green to red twice before it lets me have my walking way. On a normal straight road this would mean you would have to wait 6 cycles before being allowed to pass. The car certainly seems to be the favourite of these lights then, with the pedestrian being considered a nuisance that only has to be dealt with now and then.
The second problem I have with these lights is how long the green man stays up for. I am by no means a slow walker, I have given my girlfriend chest pains as she tries to keep up with me, so the other day I timed how long it took for me to cross at one of the sets of lights. Six seconds. Now that may sound like an ok time to get from one pavement to the other but consider this; when I got to the other side of the road the green man had gone and the traffic lights had been green for quite a few seconds. I find myself left at the mercy of the patient drivers who have to wait for me to disembark their turf before pulling off.
There are quite a few elderly people near where I live, so I managed to take the opportunity one afternoon to watch one woman trying to make it across the same section of road. If I am unable to do it in six seconds, I had to wonder what hope she had. Thirty seconds she took, and yes you may think of me as a little evil for watching her rather than helping her across the road like a good boy scout but I have a point to prove! In the time it took her to make her journey, the green man was gone before she was a quarter of the way across, and the traffic lights were screaming go by the time she was half way.
It seems to me then that this system is both biased and dangerous. Why the people who installed these lights favour the car so much is beyond me, it may be some silly method of trying to cut CO2 emissions by having them get to places sooner, it may be to get them into the shops quicker to feed the vampire of a council we have around these parts, or it may be an attempt to keep the people on one side from breeding with the people on the other. Whatever the cause, I may one day be writing to you from a hospital bed with the impression of a radiator grille across my chest and a wing mirror up my bum.
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