Flashes of Panic

There’s an intersection on my bike route to work where I have to make a left turn. There’s a traffic light with a left-turn arrow.

Normally I’d be a good boy and wait for the arrow, but the early morning rides have revealed that me on my bike is not enough whatever to trigger the turn arrow. (It’s not clear exactly how the light is cued. Older lights use detectors embedded in the pavement, and you can spoof those with a bicycle by slowly weaving across the wires, but newer lights use motion detectors. Whatever this is detecting, it’s not seeing me.) If I’m going to be a good boy, I’m going to be sitting at the intersection until a car making a left turn pulls up behind me—pretty uncomfortable, since I’m not good enough to do a track stand.

Instead, I’ve taken to going when the opposing light (not really directly across, but never mind) gives that traffic a left arrow, or some other light configuration when I’m unlikely to wind up a hood ornament. It’s a morning puzzle: what’s the safest way to get across the intersection without waiting through four or five cycles of the light?

(The instructor of my systems course used traffic lights to illustrate state machines, which is probably why I sit at the intersection trying to figure out how to hack the lights instead of rolling down the hill to the town hall and simply asking.)

Of course, I wouldn’t be in this fix if I was truly a stickler for traffic rules, and didn’t ride a few hundred meters the wrong way on a one-way street to get out of my neighborhood.

Now playing: Just Wednesday from Devil Hopping by Inspiral Carpets