It's amazing what can fit in the corner of an eye.
A few weeks ago I was sitting at a red light pondering life,
oblivious to the fact that it could all come to an end in an instant. My light
turned green and I touched the gas, which is when my peripheral vision caught a
big, red, blazing gravel truck crossing the intersection. I quickly slammed the
brakes and avoided a major accident by about a foot. The driver of the truck,
however, didn't seem to care. He wasn't thinking about "that
instant" either.
Red-light running is a traffic epidemic in this country.
Metropolitan transportation officials are trying to contain this killer virus
that makes the infected think more about themselves than the safety of others.
Intersection cameras are installed every week but the violations, along with
the debate on the effectiveness of such surveillance, continue.
The city of Chicago is relatively new to the whole camera
enforcement spectacle. Back in May an experiment was conducted on two
accident-prone intersections. During the course of the study, a minute-saving
4,500 ran the red, nearly four times the national average. Mayor Richard Daley
now plans to install cameras at up to 20 intersections, and will bother
violators with a $90 fine.
The National Motorists Association, however, believes cities
like Chicago should pay for a few traffic-engineering classes. The association
says the presence of electronic intersection surveillance causes motorists to
panic and slam on the brakes--the end result is an increase in rear-end
collisions.
"When confronted with the possibility of a red-light
camera, people panic and slam on their brakes," Chad Dornsife, NMA
spokesman, said in a Chicago Sun-Times story titled "In Chicago, red
light means Go! for a high number of drivers." "Red-light cameras
have never been shown to reduce accidents anywhere in the world."
The city admits red-light cameras will cause some accidents,
but predicts the trend will drop after 30 days.
But why should there be a fear of someone kissing your back
bumper? They teach you a neat trick in driver's education
class--it's called defensive driving. The golden rule is to keep at
least a two-second distance with the car in front of you. So if somebody drains
their brake fluid to avoid punishment there should still be enough time to
react--and this includes shaking a fist or two.
I would like to toss another safety topic into this
four-corner mess--and it has to do with signal timing. I've noticed
in Chicago there is no one-second delay when one light turns red and the other
flips to green. This safety precaution does exist out in the suburbs, where the
big, red, blazing truck almost planted itself in my front seat. If not for that
one second of pause, I may have run out of time to live.
Cameras or no cameras, people will break the red barrier.
Cities must have a system that clears the area before somebody's clock is
cleaned.
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