The Traffic Light (Part One)

(Editor's note:  This is the first segment in a two part series.)


What may we learn from the cycling of a solitary traffic light from red to green and back again?

Long distance travel by auto remains a favorite family pastime, especially during the busy holiday season.  Often, a pilgrimage to the home of relatives is the only occasion a family may have to spend meaningful time together as a unit, all in one place.  In their children parents anticipate the pleasure of a captive audience.  For children, extended travel offers a host of valuable new experiences.  It is a time when lasting memories are born.

As the family car meanders along one of the nation’s many rural state roads, invariably it encounters a lonely traffic signal.  Often, it is the only traffic light in small town America.  Fortunately, traffic is not terribly heavy, but thank goodness the light is green anyway.  And we speed on through without giving it another thought.

The intersection is often empty.  But sometimes a lone car or two may wait, patiently, for the light to change.  A certain curiosity may develop as to how long these cars have been waiting, what they may be up to.  As these cars disappear in the rear view mirror of our adventures, surely the light which is now behind us must change for them at some point, that they should be permitted to cross.  What is their story?  Occasionally, what may seem like more cars than the little town possesses are backed up to the traffic light.  The first thought of the passing motorist may be how all those cars got there and what the attraction is in the first place.

Eventually, the traffic light turns in a three part cycle, first from green, to the yellow caution, and finally to red.  The yellow permits cars driving at highway speeds sufficient time to properly judge long stopping distances and decide whether to stay on the gas pedal and continue through the intersection or hit the brake and come to a safe, controlled stop.  The yellow light is a product of the country road.  Typically, it does not even exist in the city, where the traffic light contains only a two part cycle, going from green directly to red.  Long stopping distances are of minimal concern in the physical confines of the city, where things happens faster.

At state road intersections the traffic light for the small town crossroad tends to be red for a long time.  The change to green allows as many cars to pass through safely as the short cycle permits, depending on driver reaction time.  Logic predicts better than chance that when reaction time is coordinated, more cars pass.  When it is uneven, there will be fewer.  Those cars toward the rear may be destined to wait for more than one cycle to get through.

The change to green also elicits familiar reactions drawn from the range of driving habits.  The daydreamer returns to earth just in time to barely clear the short cycle before the light is red again.  The impatient floors his older car, the one with the manual transmission, carburetor and loud exhaust pipes.  Invariably the car jerks and stalls out.  He’ll have to await the next cycle, as will the angry people stuck behind him.  The risk tolerant tests fate, taking a chance after due circumspection, and crosses against the red light.  If there are no other cars around, no traffic camera to record the transgression, then what’s the harm?

In a multi-racial, economically stratified, complex industrial society, the traffic light serves as a useful metaphor for the ordinary citizen’s interaction with change.  Some actually prefer a red light.  It represents the safety and comfort of what they know, indispensable to the measured progress of an established order whose inconvenience is trifling and may be overlooked.  For on occasion, when the light turns green, all hell breaks loose, and chaos abounds.  This is to be avoided at all costs.  Others come out on the opposite side, detesting the red light as evil and the mortal enemy of progress.  For them, the traffic light is always, or should always be, green in a perfect world.

But suppose there were a powerful force which had little interest in permitting the traffic light to change.  What happens then?

(Editor's note:  The second and concluding segment in this two part series continues the discussion of change in the context of The Traffic Light, touching upon issues ranging from civil rights, to access to affordable health care, to record levels of wealth disparity in the US today.)


-Michael D’Angelo