Timing the Traffic Light

It's a little bit of a slow day here in the Wild East so I'll write about something fast. The traffic lights are timed here. Have I mentioned this before?

Not only are they timed going from green to red, which is reasonable, but you can also see how much time you have going from red to green. Can you imagine that on Broad Street around midnight?

This adds a whole new element to traffic navigation. When I'm riding my bike, it allows me to slow down enough so that when I get to the corner, I can achieve maximum speed as soon as the light turns green. Other people like it for the opposite reason, they can speed up just in time to make the yellow light. I witnessed what happens when the two occur simultaneously.

I was riding my bike home (from a night of poker) around 9:00 pm. The streets were less crowded, as they usually are around that time of night. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see a taxi gunning through the intersection while a construction truck passes through at the same time. They simultaneously hit their brakes as the taxi swerves around the truck, hitting a concrete support beam head-on instead. Luckily, the taxi's speed was such that the driver and girls in the taxi were able to walk away. None of them got in the ambulance I phoned for. The truck driver was also unharmed, as was his truck.

So, that's it. On the whole, it was not a terribly awful or exciting event, but one to take a lesson from nonetheless.