Red Lights ...

I'm driving through a four way stop today, and I see that they are installing a red light. There is nothing wrong with this four way stop. I never have to wait long, coming from any direction, and I have never seen an accident there. Still, they are installing a red light. It occurs to me that this is the perfect symbol of increased government intervention.




Stop signs are necessary. They take messy little places on the road and give people a set of rules to follow which allows everything to proceed smoothly. You are trusted to use your own judgement, knowledge of the rules, and politeness to help things move more quickly for everyone. Most of the time, a stop sign is enough.



Red lights are annoying. Sure, sometimes they are necessary, like a stop sign is not going to be sufficient to direct traffic on a four lane highway, but the vast majority of the time, it hinders traffic. Putting a red light in in this intersection (which seems to be funded by the stimulus money), and in countless others, will cause what was once a smoothly running bit of road to turn into a chaotic mess. Unlike stop signs, which give you the rules and trust you to use your judgement and follow them to know when you should and should not go, red lights tell you when to go and when not to. Instead of trusting people to decide when they should and should not go, people are forced to obey some machine programmed by some guy on the basis of standardizations and predictions. Suddenly, your twenty minute commute is now a thirty minute commute, you find yourself backed up in traffic which never existed before, and you find yourself driving increasingly dangerously to attempt to get through before the light turns red. Sometimes, you find yourself the only person at the intersection in the middle of the night, waiting for the light to turn green, wondering if the traffic engineers were vindictive or incompetent. You are wasting gas, money, and time, and releasing all sorts of polution into the environment. Pretty soon, you see the first accident you have ever seen at that red light. They took a perfectly smoothly working place (oh sure, you ran into the occasional rude driver), and, because they didn't trust people to be able to exercise their own judgement, they turned it into this monstrosity. And the red light was expensive, too!