Residents Got Fed Up With A Slow Intersection Near Their HOA, So They Started Using The Crosswalk Button To Try To Change The Light Faster
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A five-second green light turned one neighborhood’s morning commute into total chaos.
Police warned everyone to stop running the red light, but the city wouldn’t fix the timing.
Then one neighbor found a perfectly legal button that made the light stay green longer.
Check out how the whole neighborhood joined in.
Police tell us to stop running red lights. Fine, we’ll just extend how long it stays green.
I live in a subdivision connected to a major road. The road out of the subdivision has a traffic light.
In the morning, nearly everybody needs to turn left for work. Even if you want to turn right, you are simply stuck because there isn’t enough room for more than one car.
To compound the problem, the traffic light is green for no more than 5 seconds.
We MAY get 4-5 cars out legally, then you have to wait another 3-4 minutes before the light switches.
This sounds dangerous.
As you can imagine, this causes people to run the light, swerve around somebody they thought should have gone, etc.
It’s a grab back of “Idiots in Cars”, myself included.
If you roll up to the light and see that you are 15 cars back, you know you’ve just added 10 minutes to your commute simply trying to get out of your subdivision.
Now, the police are involved.
Well, because of all of our reckless driving behavior, the police communicated via our HOA that we needed to knock it off.
They had a police car parked near our area every morning for a week to keep us on our best behavior.
Our board tried to work with the city to lengthen the light, but to no avail.
That’s when a hero emerged.
The plan involves an unused pedestrian crosswalk.
We get a random email to the HOA distribution list from an anonymous person. They laid out our plan for malicious compliance.
There is a pedestrian crosswalk light at the before mentioned intersection that basically goes unused. In my 10 years living there, I’ve never seen it used.
There just simply isn’t any pedestrian traffic.
The subdivision hero devised a plan on how to use this crosswalk to our advantage.
This is actually a good idea.
Basically, one person in their car simply needs to walk over and hit the “Push Button to Cross” and run back to their car.
When to light switches, we now get 30ish seconds to alleviate our traffic jam.
Everybody is joining in, and it’s hilarious.
My oldest daughter got to do it the other day, and other cars in the line were rolling down their windows and cheering her on.
The plan is actually working.
It’s possibly the best neighborhood bonding experience possible.
I’m sure our longer lights are screwing up something further down the line, but none of us really care.
We’re now on our “best” behavior since we have about 5 times longer to get through the light.
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I love that the neighborhood is bonding together over this. It’s not an ideal solution, but it sounds like it works.
Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.
This person did the same thing.
Here’s another similar story.
This trick doesn’t work everywhere.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about neighborhood kids who built a master forest fort, only to find it looted by the bigger kids on the block.
Sometimes rules are all about the money.
Drivers started pressing the pedestrian crossing button, giving everyone about 30 seconds to leave the neighborhood safely.
The trick stopped the red-light running and even turned morning traffic into a strange community event.
They didn’t break the rules, they just pushed the right button.
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