Tripping the light: Fantastic!

By Staff     May 7, 2010

I don’t like traffic lights.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some sort of two-wheeled anarchist, nor am I one of those reviled/suicidal cyclist-scofflaws who think traffic signals are for motorized vehicles only.

But when I’m on my bike, I really don’t like traffic lights, and it has nothing to do with maintaining momentum or “The Flow” or anything like that.

My saddle-bound disdain of stoplights stems simply from the fact I can’t get ’em to work.

See, as far as I can tell, there are two types of stoplights: timed and trigger. I’m sure there are other fancy-pants terms to describe these lights — fixed-time interval, dynamic in-pavement detectors, etc. — but I’m sticking with timed and trigger. (Budding traffic engineers, please feel free to drop me a nasty e-mail deriding my oversimplification; I’d be glad to add them to the virtual vitriol pile from disgruntled drivers, cyclists and cat-lovers).

Timed lights are stupid. Every so often, regardless of traffic density, the lights cycle. Reds turn green, greens go yellow then red. An interval passes, then the lights cycle again.

I like timed lights. They’re simple, just like me, and regular. Whether or not I’m regular really is none of your business. They’re predictable, but I’m sure you knew I was going to say that.

Then there are the infernal trigger lights.

In theory, they’re great. Lights on busy through streets stay green until a vehicle comes along on a side street and eventually triggers the lights to change. In theory.

Trouble is, most of these in-ground sensors — I know there are some high-tech options out there — are glorified metal detectors. Cars and trucks are big iron, so triggering the lights is no biggie.

But bikes are small iron. In fact, I’d bet only a small fraction are ferrous metal — you know, the kind that’s magnetic and can rust and, oh yeah, can be detected by metal detectors — at all. I have a bunch of bikes. Only one is steel. The rest are beer cans: aluminum.

Today’s most popular bike material for high-end bikes, is … plastic. OK, carbon fiber, but that’s plasticky enough.

So it’s not uncommon for a poor cyclist to roll up to a light, and wait. And wait. And wait.

I’m reminded of a joke my wife and I share whenever we go to a restaurant and suffer shabby service. We always say we need to procure a human skeleton or two, and when the service is particularly bad, we’d leave the bones where we were sitting and sneak out the back. (As an aside, I tried to procure a human skeleton with my first wife; you’d never believe how hard it is to get all the meat off the bones.) (As another aside, I’m totally kidding. I’ve only been married once, and, besides, I had nothing to do with it. I have an alibi. Honest.)

My wife would never go through with it. She’s too nice. I totally would, if only so I could go back in a day or two to retrieve my skeleton from lost and found.

But I think about the old dry-bones joke every time I’m stuck at a light that refuses to change until something bigger and more metallic rolls up. Think of the message that would send to the powers-that-be who find a skeleton astride a bike at the offending intersection.

And a couple of days later, I could go to the police station asking for my first wife’s, er, um, my lost-and-found skeleton back.

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35391Tripping the light: Fantastic!