Observations on traffic lights

The centre of Liverpool is currently a mass of roadworks, an operation that the city council has cheerily branded "the Big Dig". So now, among other inconveniences, the traffic lights have very short green phases. They seem to be having a laugh at the frustrated driver, like a cheeky matador urging a bull forward before whipping the cape away.

I am in traffic, and the driver behind me is honking his horn and throwing his hands up in despair. My crime? I have stopped at a traffic light as soon as it has turned red, thus flouting a new, unwritten rule of the road.

In the 1960s there was a public information film about the Amber Gambler, the foolhardy motorist who raced past traffic lights just before they turned red. This seems quaint compared to a more recent phenomenon: driving through lights after they have turned red, in the seconds before the next set of cars gets moving.

Traffic lights have become a symbol of petty-minded authoritarianism. Before the 2001 general election, the Tories, in their usual role of ally of the motorist against meddlesome rule-makers, mooted the idea of a "left on red" law, a version of the North American "right on red", which allows drivers stuck at traffic lights to turn right if the road is clear. And as every London cabbie claims to know, Ken Livingstone tampered with the sequencing of lights to make traffic in the capital appear lighter once the congestion charge was introduced. (This conspiracy theory, first aired by an anonymous source in the London Evening Standard in March 2002, has become folklore.)

The problem is that drivers see a red traffic light as an isolated annoyance, rather than as part of a complex system of traffic management. With or without the intervention of the London mayor, traffic engineers "tamper" with the phasing of the lights all the time, using computer programmes such as SCOOT (split cycle time and offset optimisation technique), which processes traffic-flow data with the aid of sensors on the approaches to junctions. Without such tweaking, traffic in our congested cities would simply stop moving. But the sophisticated traffic-control network is, to use the technical term, "black-boxed" - it is invisible to motorists.

In the popular imagination, traffic lights are either mindless automata, blinking on and off in perpetuity; or they are political instruments that reveal the arrogance and chicanery of our masters. In the 1990s, East Berliners' opposition to the relentless westernisation of their half of the city inspired a campaign to stop Berlin from replacing the old GDR lights, with their cute, jauntily hatted Ampelmannchen ("little traffic-light man"), with bland West German equivalents. As the boom in car ownership and building projects created virtual gridlock on Berlin's roads, this case of "ostalgia" served as a displaced protest against a new kind of tedium unknown under communism: the traffic jam.

Similarly, the increasing reluctance to obey traffic lights in Britain is part of a resistance to the paraphernalia of the traffic management industry - speed humps, cameras, chicanes - which has spread as our roads have become busier. The traffic-light refusenik assumes that, left to the well-meaning improvisations of the individual motorist, the traffic will flow much more smoothly. Like some drivers in southern Europe, we are beginning to see red lights as helpful suggestions rather than firm commands. Red doesn't always mean stop, does it?

Joe Moran's book Reading the Everyday is published by Routledge

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