No, not those sorts of flashers. I’m talking about flashing traffic lights. I usually get to work early enough that most of the traffic lights along 17th street are set to flashing mode–usually red one way and yellow the other. The problem is that those lights are set to switch to regular mode at about the time I’m driving through town. This morning, I pulled up to one light that was flashing red, stopped, and proceeded to enter the intersection. Half-way through making a left-hand turn, I looked up and saw that the light had changed to solid red. Oops! There was no one coming, obviously, because I’d been careful about looking for oncoming traffic, but still, it was unnerving to be in the middle of an intersection when I wouldn’t normally be there.
Another thing that bugs me about flashers–again, not the nudie type–is that some people seem to believe, even though they’re stopped on the red side of a red-yellow flashing intersection, that they should treat it as a four-way stop. I Don’t Think So. Flashing red means you stop until the intersection is clear in the other direction. We have a yellow flasher, which means, “You have the right-of-way, but proceed with caution because there might be some asshat who thinks it’s a four-way stop, waiting for a chance to T-bone you.
red paper boat 