This Little Light of ...Yours...

Thursday, July 06, 2006

"This Little Light of...Yours..."

Current mood:  distressed

Category: Life

As a kid in Children's Church, I learned the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, "This Little Light of Mine". I think one of the lines goes, "I'm going to let it shine!"

Well, for St. Johns County, those two lines above are SO true.

I received a ticket for running a red light at the intersection of 312 and A1A yesterday.

Right now, as I munch on crackers and chocolate (which, by the way, is yummy) I'm contemplating on whether or not I should pay the ticket.

By rights, I should. The cop did tell me I had run a red light, which is true. But here's my defense - while you are stuck behind large cars, you cannot see the stop light. On top of that, when there is a car following you closely, you get afraid to slam on your brakes, for fear of being rear-ended (which has also happened to me). Here's the clincher - when the light is green and then turns yellow, you expect the yellow light to remain lit for at LEAST five seconds. As most people know, the yellow light comes on to indicate to the driver to slow down and stop because, yes! there will be a red light coming on!

But what happened yesterday is that I was followed closely by someone, but he managed to stop in time. I was halfway through the intersection by the time the light turned red. The light was still green by the time my tires had hit the white stripe on the asphalt, but immediately turned yellow and then two seconds later, red.

I noticed this change of the lights the other day when I was coming back from Jacksonville on US 1. Most of US1 between this fair little city and Jacksonville has a speed limit of 65 mph. There are also stop lights in between. The Yellow Light Delay, however is not what it should be. The time is two or three seconds, thus giving you, the driver, not enough time to slam on your brakes because of A) there's someone closely following you, B) you're going the speed limit, which is way too fast to be going when you need to stop at an intersection, C) or you'll just have to run a red light because you were 100 feet from the intersection while it was still green, suddenly blinked yellow and then immediately changed to red.

On top of all this, I could barely understand the cop when he spoke. He pretty muched mumbled like a vacuum and twanged like a redneck, but I am in the South, so that's nothing new when someone "tawks lahk theus" His Southern accent was so thick that I had to ask him to repeat himself several times. The bits that I did understand made me upset.

I totally understand that he was doing his job, (but of course) I don't see why he had to target me. After he stopped me, he told me "Well, I know that all those other people ran the red light, but there's only one of me, so you get to be my victim today" Had he known what I was really thinking or if looks could kill...I think you get my point.

He also told me that as of July 1, St. Johns Cty or maybe all of Florida, (I don't remember in fact) had installed these tiny, white light meters above the stop lights. What they do is monitor "out-of-state" drivers like myself and also in-staters (okay, so ALL drivers) on intersections. They transmit some sort of signal to a cop in his car or on his motorcycle and tell him that someone has run a red light and that way, State Troopers and County Sherrif people can crack down on Red Light Runners, like me.

What I really wanted to say was that I didn't care about that, but that's not true. I would care if someone hit me or vice versa (God forbid). I was really thinking, "Why aren't you catching the bad FLORIDIAN drivers?! Like when people are driving around in their huge pickup trucks with people piled, UNRESTRAINED in the truck bed! Or when people are weaving around the road drunk because they just got finished watching NASCAR and didn't have anything better to do than to emulate their "hero" on the some track in backwoods Alabama, REALLY posing a problem for people! Huh?"

As it is, I'll pay for my fine, but before I do that, I want them (being the lovely law enforcement) to know that they seriously need to do something with the yellow light delay. I mean, that's probably why so many people run red lights in this state. There's not enough time to stop.

I think that's only fair.

Then they can keep their shoddy light system.

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