Reminder: Stop for red lights

[nowalmart.livejournal.com]

Just a reminder for all of you drivers out there that the two lights on Alewife Brook Parkway between Mass Ave and Broadway are, in fact, traffic lights that do, in fact, turn red on occasion. They do not simply flash green and yellow all the time.

They turn red when a pedestrian wants to cross the road. Please stop when the light is red so you do not mow down some innocent pedestrian who is trying to cross in a crosswalk with a red light.

I say this because I am a runner and my long run takes me down Alewife Brook Parkway. I do not want to have to cross the road, but the sidewalk only goes half the distance on the south-east side of the road. I get to a crossing, I press the button, the light turns red, and then EVERY TIME a car comes flying through at a very high rate of speed. One driver even flicked me off and honked his horn at me.

I normally have other problems with drivers and crosswalks while on my runs, but this is the one place where I consistently feel like if I make one wrong move I might get seriously hurt.

Comments

hmmm...

[guttyelg.livejournal.com]

I always wondered whether those lights turned red or not... Flashing green lights are kind of confusing. I wonder why they didn't just go and put in a flashing yellow, seems like that would work better... like the one on ABP down by medford square.

[bombardiette.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way driving through the rotaries on that road. It's not just pedestrians that so many drivers here have a flagrant disregard for.

Be safe.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I regularly see cars speeding through the red crosswalk lights in Powderhouse Sq., sometimes even in view of cops, and nobody ever gets pulled over. We've taught Somerville drivers that red lights don't mean anything.

[ceo]

Flashing green means "this is a green traffic light that only turns red for special occasions, so normally you don't need to worry about it".

Unless you're in Canada, in which case it means "oncoming traffic has a red light so you can turn left". Those flash faster though.

[slomotionwalter.livejournal.com]

There's a similar problem at a spot near Sullivan Square where you can either turn left onto a rotary or keep going straight to the highway. I bike past there, and there's no way for me to make it from the right side of the road to the rotary on the left without pressing the crosswalk button and getting the red light, but I have been almost clipped at least five times by people who don't even slow down at the light, let alone stop, and someone almost always runs it.

[stutts.livejournal.com]

I see this all the time at that crosswalk on Somerville Ave behind the Star Market. I never take a step out onto that street without making sure that traffic in both directions is stopped, because after that light turns red there will invariably be at least one car that runs it, and sometimes two or three.