“Traffic lights” according to Wikipedia, “are signalling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings and other locations to control competing flows of traffic.” But as a humble cyclist I will not compete with mobs of motorised behemoths – that way lies sudden megadeath. So what control should traffic lights have on a non-competing traffic flow willing to weave through available gaps?
The super-objective of traffic control is the rapid safe transit of cars and the preservation of pedestrians. Responsible pedal-pushers won’t interfere with that. Canny cyclists learn the phases of lights in their neighbourhood and on oft-travelled routes.
Cresting Edgecliff on New South Head Road it helps to recognise you have 15 seconds more green after the Ocean Street right turn arrow starts. Approaching Taylor Square from the north, noting the green arrow to Flinders Street encourages ducking down Foley Lane. Knowing the order of left and right turning arrows offered motorists in Campbell and Riley Streets often eases one through that intersection by Police Headquarters.
Somewhere in their youths or childhoods some simpletons must have won animal stamps for dobbing and ever since have hissed and pointed at perceived transgressions: “Ooh, look, look, Miss, he ran the red!” Oh, the condemning faces and tut-tutting endured for having the temerity to ride the bike on a pedestrian way. Please, neurotic Nellies all, complain after you suffer – not in Chicken Little anticipation welling from a mindset so gloomily self-pitying that any stimulus makes you fear for your miserable subsistence.
Traffic lights send signals. The simple coded messages provided are interpreted according to the viewer’s intelligence and experience. If you are confused or affronted by others’ interpretation of traffic controlling machines, rather than rush to judgement, watch and learn.
As happy Prince Willie might vaingloriously pronounce “One may be flouting the conventional interpretation of the signs of the times whilst honouring the principle those signs too crudely represent”. Or, as Tony Abbott puts it – “ Some people just do not get it.”
by Peter Whitehead
You May Also Like
