Attention anyone who has ever been behind the wheel of a vehicle:
THE YELLOW LIGHT IN YOUR DIRECTION DOES NOT MEAN SPEED UP SO THAT YOU ARE JUST BEGINNING TO ENTER THE INTERSECTION WHEN THE LIGHT IN MY DIRECTION TURNS GREEN.
If the light has been yellow long enough that it will be red by the time you begin to enter the intersection, YOU MISSED YOUR TURN.
You’re lucky I was the only car perpendicular to your speeding ass and noticed you had no intentions of slowing down, even though you were still almost a full block from the stoplight when it turned yellow on you.
I have to confess, there was a time when I used recreational pharmaceuticals. I had, well, let’s say used preventive medicine for glaucoma when this episode of Taxi first aired. If it was possible to die laughing I would have that night.
I was once abused by a woman behind me for slowing down and stopping at a yellow light. I got off my motorcycle and tapped on her window but she got shy and declined my polite offer to discuss the road rules
A slightly more serious response.
Have you ever gone through a yellow light, just made it through before it turned red and said to self, “Self, I really pushed it” and then see in your rearview mirror 1-2 more cars blow through?
Traffic planners have extended the length of the yellow light, and they’ve added a pause before the green light on the cross streets.
Both of these measures have the counter-intuitive effect of making the problem worse. Yellow light jumpers now know that most times, they can make the light, particularly if they speed up. Unfortunately, there is that rare time when they don’t make the light, and the results are disastrous.
I think the yellow light should be on for just a second or two, like it was 30-40 years ago. People approaching an intersection will learn to watch for a change to yellow when the lights been green for a long time, and people on the cross streets will learn to look both ways before crossing the intersection.
My talent for getting EVERY FRICKIN’ RED LIGHT on the way to a destination is quite legendary among my social circle. For example, picking up a friend on the way out:
Her: “Hey I’m going to do my makeup in the car.”
Me: “Don’t worry, we’ll get all the reds.”
Her: “C’mon, everyone says that…”
Me: “Wait for it, count 'em off, write it down, keep track somehow.”
And yes, by the time we get to where ever we’re going, I’ll have hit at least 95% of the reds. By this point, I slow down whenever I’m approaching a stoplight, because I just assume it’s going to turn. Not a great habit, I guess, but I’ve become used to giving myself plenty of time to get around. Though it’s led to a bad habit… smoking in my car, just because I seem to spend so much damn time just sitting there, not moving, and I get anxious if I’m not doing something. Wow, tangent.
Anyway, my point: when I took my driving course a couple of years ago, my instructor noticed my freakish luck with lights, so we had plenty of time to rehearsh the stoplight drill: you’re stopped at an intersection, the light turns green, and you take a long look to the left, then the middle, then the right, to make sure everyone who should be stopped is actual stopped. Vancouver drivers seem to see yellow as “c’mon c’mon c’mon, go go go go go!”, so I can’t tell you how many times this little cautious pause has saved me from being T-boned as some jackass zooms through the had-been-yellow-before-he-even-turned-onto-that-road light. 'Course, it’s also led to a LOT of honking in my general direction, but whatever. Being honked at **> ** having the right of way but being DEAD, in my opinion.
I do take yellow to mean that if I have not entered the intersection, I should stop if I can do so safely. If a light I am approaching turns yellow, I look in my rearview mirror to make sure there is not a car right on my ass and then I slow and stop at the light. I have lost count of how many time a car that was behind me a good ways sped up when I started to slow down, seemingly in an effort to scare me to not stop. These belligerent moron nearly always gesticulate wildly and seem to be swearing as well. I have had some near collisions because I did not enter the intersection on yellow and as I sit there stopped at a yellow about to turn red, some idiot nearly rear ends me because he refuses to believe that a car could actually be stopped at a yellow light.
Lady Mung and I were in Fremont, Ohio this past week to visit her mother and grandmother. We had the damnedest time there because we never…NEVER…got a yellow unless we were at that point at which you absolutely know you can’t stop without slamming on the brakes but if you go through you’ll catch red. Fastest damn yellows I’ve ever seen. Luckily it’s sparsely populated so it wasn’t too bad but it so frequent that it amazed me.
As an aside, I would also like to express my disdain for those who wait at stopsigns and decide they don’t want to wait for you and the person behind you to go by. Not five minutes from Lady Mung’s house on the return leg of our trip we had some punk in his mommy’s car tailgating us like crazy because we were going the speed limit (God, in his infinite wisdom, forbid). A taxi-van, in which I presume there were no passengers, cut us off from a perpendicular stopsign by an extremely narrow margin. Worst case scenario: not only would we have T-boned this vapid motherfucker, we would have had a Caprice up under the rear bumper. Luckily, nothing came of it.
There are some stupid cuntnuggets out there. I don’t get upset usually, unless it involves nearly having me get paralyzed. Fucking asscaps.
Bummer, I never actually seen that, I think its because in NJ & NYC most drivers are aggressive and defensive drivers look very carefully before pulling out.
No cites, just 20+ years of observation. I’m on the aggressive side but appear more defensive than average on the yellow lights.
Daily. Seriously almost every time I “push it” there’s people coming right behind me. At least that really lessens my chance to get a ticket.
Much as it would be nice to do, you’re not allowed to run into the person running a red light. If you run into them, you’re at least partially responsible. (the generic you, not Spongemom, but whoever does the running in to)
One or two? Here in Baltimore it’s more likely to be four or five.
Seriously, in this town i sometimes think that people learning to drive must be taught that “yellow is the same as green” and “red means you should think about maybe stopping if you’re more than two blocks from the light.”
