Why I Hate Stoplights… Or, Rather, Why They Hate Me

Ancient Aliens Theorists assert that Zeus and Poseidon were actually powerful alien beings who came to Earth and presented themselves as gods.  I now know this to be true, because I have run afoul of an old Greek god with a foul temper and a vengeful spirit.  Umussnago Pastus is the ancient Greek god of the traffic light, and for reasons unknown, he has decided to do to me at least as much damage as Poseidon once did to Odysseus.

 Now, the reason I have to worry about Umussnago’s foul humors is that I am a city dweller.  I live in Carrollton, on the Western side of the Dallas part of the DFW metroplex.   My teaching job, however, is on the East side of Dallas in Garland.  That means my morning commute (which I must begin at 6 o’clock A.M. to avoid traffic) is liberally blessed with 45-plus stoplights.  Depending on what circuitous, weaselly route I must follow, I can pass through the jurisdiction of as many as 52 stop lights.

A stop light, for you country bumpkins who have to face only one or two in your entire town, is a hideous time-consuming torture device.  They were invented in the late eighteen hundreds by the British, particularly on engineer named J.P. Knight, who apparently knew in advance that they would one day inflict far more harm and mental duress on the rebellious colonies than they would on the honorable homeland.  A four-way light, which almost all of them are in the Dallas area, can force you to sit for as much as four minutes.  I have a morning commute that at its absolute best takes twenty minutes to travel by car while following a safe speed limit (actually with Texas drivers, anything less than twenty miles per hour over the limit will get you killed from behind… killed by car crash, too, not just by sixgun).  Four minutes multiplied by fifty-two stoplights is… a major commuting problem.

Those of you who managed to stay awake during high school math class already see that by the statistical probability of hitting red out of three whole choices should not cause me to sit and percolate at a red light for the almost four hours of extra commute time that this makes possible.  However, I have, in fact, counted forty red lights in one drive five different times.  How many times have I had forty or more greens, you say?  Never.  This led me to suspect that old Umussnago didn’t like me.  But a number of other factors encountered time after time, have led me to believe he positively loathes me.

If you are approaching a green light, especially a stale green light that you know is soon going to turn yellow and then the deadly red, you can increase your speed and try to skate through the intersection  on yellow.  Does this work for me?  Ah, no.  Umussnago will somehow make the yellow light into a super-short nano-second flash so that you end up driving through the intersection not on yellow, but on red.  Why is this a problem?  Red-light intersection dashes equal a three-hundred to four-hundred dollar ticket.  And there is almost always a lurking cop to see it.  If not the cop, there are those insidious intersection cameras that snap a quick video of you committing the capital offense of red-light violations.  Try arguing with a Garland or Richardson or Farmers’ Branch traffic court that you didn’t actually violate a sacred red light!  They have the video.  I have paid enough tickets that I start slowing down to a stop while the light is still green.

Then, too, if you think you can’t make it through the intersection on green, or at least yellow, before you contemplate the stop, you have to remember the average Texan driver behind you is thoroughly convinced that he is going to get by being the last car to zoom through as the light is changing to red.  He is, in fact, speeding up behind you as you make the horribly unwise decision to stop.  You are going to die.  Umussnago is pleased by this.

People who ride with me comment that I must have the most incredibly bad luck with stop lights of any human being on Earth.  They see how I go from one light turning from green to red and trapping me for the maximum stop-light sit-time to the next where exactly the same thing happens, to the next, and the next, and… well, this just gets ridiculous after a while.  Apparently no one but me sees him sitting up there laughing at me.  Umussnago Pastus, Greek-dang god of traffic lights!