Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Crawling a Red Light:

Our town is choked with road construction projects, a maze of detours and pitted roads. My wife says the general effect is that “You can’t get here from there.” This morning around 6 a.m. I turned onto one of the worst roads, where the surface has been stripped away before resurfacing. There’s a bumpy sublayer plus humps that were not removed, pits, raised manhole covers and traps. The driver just ahead of me went verrry slowly, trying to concentrate (I'm sure) on the surface and not wipe out his handsome vehicle.

We approached a place where there are two lights, synchronized, about 200 feet apart. He went carefully through the first one as it turned yellow. I hot-pinked it to stay with him. Then I looked up at the next light (now red of course), and I had a thought: the guy in front of me was concentrating on the road so carefully that he was going to go right through that light!

And he did. This is not what you call “Running a red light”; he was only going ten miles per hour. He went through this T intersection, oblivious to the cars that had the right of way on his left. There was no mishap, and I’m sure he took very good care of his car.

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