bad decision

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 16:06:20 -0700, "alan" .@. wrote:

Hi group. This is what happened to me last night riding home at 12am. Very
wet, brakes not too responsive, coming up to a light anticipating the green
by watching the yellow turn to red for the cross street. wait, wait, no
green! Too late to stop! Cars coming towards me on a green left turn arrow
that I had never noticed before! Snap decision to accelerate through. Thank
the gods I had been seen. Lesson learned. Just wanted to share.

Good observation. What you saw is the latest trend in traffic lights.
All red for a brief but noticeable time during the change. It was
supposed to cut down on right of way violations and incursions such as
you describe.

However, the brilliant drivers have gotten wise to this, and now, a
yellow light means "speed up", and the red means you've only got ten
seconds to get through the intersection, i.e. the red has the meaning
the yellow used to have. I've seen cops sit and watch this behavior.
without doing anything about it.

I've also heard people say that there's an actual "grace period" to
run the light if you're at the end of the line to get through, and
that it's perfectly acceptable to run the "first part" of a red light.

But then, in a recent survey I read somewhere, half of the people
asked said that traffic in the right lane of a controlled-access
highway had a duty to move to allow mergers on. Today, a
bumper-to-bumper gaggle came down the onramp, tailgating a slow
driver. The driver immediately behind the slow driver tried to come
around, cross an interval between cars and merge into the second lane.
Problem was, someone was already there. That driver did some expert
driving to avoid a multi-car pileup.

Do you even have to take a test to get a driver's license anymore????