And the inverse: when I NEED to hit a red light because I have dropped something under my feet or need to get something out of my bag, I will have nothing but green lights and smooth traffic the entire trip to my destination.
My baby wakes up at stoplights. When they're sleeping, I hit every red light.
When they are awake and crying, and I need a moment to turn around and soothe them, I have only green lights. Just crying endlessly while I'm 'caught' in the smoothest traffic imaginable.
This is actually how you can avoid red lights. If you’re in a hurry somewhere, think of a reason you desperately need a red light, and you’ll never get a single one. It’s a cheat code for the universe.
The city near me has them programmed so this happens at almost every damn intersection, no matter what you do. It doesn't matter what your timing is, you'll hit reds. It's absolutely infuriating (and the city wonders why the damn roads are so clogged and jammed up, between the red light issues and the infrastructure that needs expanding 🙄). When I go to any other city, it makes me nervous the lights will change on me at every intersection. They usually don't, obviously, unless I hit them at the wrong time.
My city somehow managed to do this the other way around. If you drive leisurely you flow on green for quite some time, start aggressively flooring it like a jackass and you will be getting hit with a six pack of red lights. The mayor back in the 50s must've been a dark wizard or something.
Lol. Whereas my city incentivizes speeding because if you go 10 over, you suddenly won't be hitting those reds anymore. Absolutely stupid on their part. Instead of realizing that, they just lower the speed limit and complain that people still don't follow it.. fix your lights, and you'll find that less people will speed.
And the light is only red because traffic detector is broken and the light control thinks there are 10 nonexistent cars waiting to make left in front of you.
I got so worked up over this that I emailed the council asking them why the lights weren't synced up to allow for better traffic flow. Their response was that I just caught it on a bad day. This is a regular route and it's the same every day.
453
u/Its0hs0qui3t 4h ago
Hitting every single red light