TEMPORARY TRAFFIC LIGHT ANXIETY

It’s very early in the morning on a fairly quiet country lane and you’re rattling along, trying like everyone else is to get where you want to go, when you round a bend and there they are, a new and completely unexpected set of roadworks that you know weren’t there the day before, and next to them is standing a set of temporary traffic lights, resolutely blazing out a beacon of brightest red in the darkest darkness just before the dawn.

And so, because you have to, you stop and you wait… and wait… and wait…

If you are lucky, you can see the back of the traffic light unit at the opposite end of the roadworks, and you can probably see quite clearly that there are no other cars coming in the other direction, but still you wait, and wait, and other cars start to pull up behind you and you continue to wait.

Thirty seconds tick by, and then a minute, and then you start to wonder whether the lights have been set up correctly and then you really have to start thinking about whether it will be alright to just go through them even though they are still on red and every single fibre of your being, and everything you’ve ever known about driving tells you that really you shouldn’t and that going through a red light is simply wrong.

Even if you’ve got no choice.

Even if you are 100 per cent certain that there has obviously been some kind of cock-up and that the workpersons must have knocked off the previous evening without setting them up properly and that, for the past twelve hours since finishing time yesterday evening, other motorists have been having much the same dilemma as you are currently facing.

Eventually, sometimes with the “gentle persuasion” of the mighty engines revving away at your tailgate you take an executive decision and go for it, guiltily passing the “When light is red wait here” sign and heading off into the unknown territory of potential head-on collisions and hidden cameras.

If you are very lucky you will get through without meeting another motorist who has just come to much the same conclusion whilst heading in the other direction, and hopefully they are not on their way to your house to see you, and you will pass through the roadworks finding another red light pointing resolutely and sternly in the direction you are heading towards, thus justifying your necessary decision to break the rules.

Occasionally, an even more resolute motorist will be waiting at this second red light and, if you are feeling kindly towards your fellow traveller that morning,  you will pause to roll down your own window and impart the necessary information that will hopefully send them on their way without their own set of personal demons to battle.

If you’re a motorist, this is one of the dilemmas that you occasionally come across, namely: Just how long should you leave it before you decide that the wretched things have been set up wrongly and both ends have been set to red?

There is no correct answer, it appears. I’ve been behind some people who seem to need much longer than I do to reach this decision, and others who seem to pause for merely a blink of an eye as if there were nothing there at all, although I suspect that they are possibly the type who treat proper, permanent traffic lights with much the same cavalier attitude.

Similarly, if you’re on a bicycle, the “traffic light dilemma” really doesn’t seem to bother some cyclists quite as much either. I might be very wrong about this, but, judging by what I have witnessed as both a motorist and a pedestrian over the decades, somehow, some cyclists – and you know who you are – really do consider themselves exempt. You seem to think that you can sail through junctions and pedestrian crossings as if the red lights aren’t really referring to you, but the car driver, sitting in his does not have this option. Granted we often do a lot that is wrong, especially with regards to “cycle/car relations”, but if a car hits a bike, it seems to be always the car driver’s fault, even if the cyclist has sailed through a red light as if it simply wasn’t there.

This can lead to severe injury or worse and trauma for everyone involved, but things can get even worse if you’re a pedestrian that a cyclist or motorist decides to sail through as if you’re invisible. A few mornings ago I was trying to overtake a bike going downhill and I was already doing thirty, when I decided that it wasn’t going to happen and so I stayed behind him even though he slowed down as we got to the next hill to get past some parked cars and I was then stuck behind him for quite some time. I took a few of those moments to give some consideration to what it must feel like if you are a pedestrian who gets hit when a bike and its rider piles into you doing those kinds of speeds as you cross the road on a pelican crossing because it simply failed to stop.

It really is going to do you (both) some real harm.

Possibly not as much harm as when a car hits a cyclist, but harm nevertheless.

Now I really, really don’t want to turn this into a “cyclists versus motorists” debate here, after all, as in most things, there is much to fault on both sides, but I can only remark upon what I’ve actually seen, and sometimes it is, quite frankly terrifying, especially if you see what does go on if you ever head into the city.

Nobody, it seems, wants to stop for anyone.

Still, now we’ve mulled over those little roadway dilemmas, what’s the etiquette for the tricky little matter of overtaking a bicycle on a bend as you head uphill…? The “no overtaking” lines are clearly there to stop cars trying to get past each other and heading into the oncoming traffic, but when you find yourself behind a wheezing elderly gentleman pedal pushing his way uphill with some fully loaded panniers and a whole host of safety lights that barely fill a third of the available road width, is it alright to go for the overtake or should you risk the wrath (and impatience) of all the train of vehicles behind you by resolutely sticking to the ten-or-so m.p.h, he’s achieving until there’s a clear straight stretch available to get by…?

Motoring dilemmas… There are no easy answers it seems…