The unresponsive traffic signal and what a CPA would do about it

The paper-boy CPA has done it again! Yesterday, for the second time in a few months, my timing was such that I was leaving the distribution center at the appropriate time for observing him do a certain thing. It's rare for any two carriers to happen to leave the distribution center in the same several-minute period, but yesterday, I was a half-minute behind him, thereby getting a bird's-eye view.

And sure enough, he did the same thing that he'd done the time in October that I'd happened to be in a position to see it. I would have used it as fodder for this diatribe _then_ if my home 'pooter hadn't just broken down then; but, it's just as well that instead, I had time in the meantime to more properly introduce him to y'all, in my "Our friend the paper-boy CPA" entry.

I'll save _what_ he did (which, I imagine, was the thing that any CPA would do) for the punch line.

Incidentally, I hope that this blog's "actually multimodal" subtitle confession shows up on most computers (it usually doesn't on this old Mac that I recently hooked up, but since my fan Mr. Ardelli informs me that the Mac's model number indicates that it's _very_ "old", I suspect that it shows up for everybody except me). That's important because, contrary to the "Bicycle Messengering" other part of the title, I haven't brought my bike along on the delivery again yet since the last times that I boasted about doing so. I'm waiting until I get around to scrounging another freewheel for it (maybe I will by next Sunday). Nor, even when I do bring the bike along, does my current paperboying state of the art accommodate riding it to leave the distribution center, because that's a part of the trip on which I'm hauling the full load. In short, this diatribe will be about a location where I'm always motoring when on the delivery.

But unresponsive traffic signals is a subject that cyclists often discuss, because usually when one of those metal-detector loops fails to detect a vehicle, the vehicle that it fails to detect is a bike and it has no problem at all detecting a car or truck.

That's a violation of the principle that a bicycle is a vehicle. On the Chainguard yahoo group, they call it a violation of "VC", or the vehicular-cycling principle, but I have an even more succinct thing to call it: It's a violation of the Triad, i.e. my proposed Bicyclists' Rights Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm (which in my opinion is the only succinct _and_ comprehensive summary of all of the important aspects of the vehicular-cycling principle).

The traffic signal exiting the distribution center, on the other hand (the one for those of us who turn left onto rt. 11, by the video store, to be exact) is unresponsive in a way that _doesn't_ necessarily discriminate against cyclists: It's apparently unreliable in detecting _motor_ vehicles!

A separate problem with it is how long it makes you sit there even when it does detect you. In 2007, it could be counted on to waste a whole 3 minutes of your time, and then, since sometime in 2008, it's been only about 2 minutes; I guess they must have adjusted it. The simplest option of what they _should_ have done and which they still could do - to solve the problem at least for during these pre-dawn hours that we're talking about, when traffic is sparse - is simply change it to flash mode.

The part that earns this signal an F, however, is that about once every few months, it completely _fails_ to detect my pickup truck! I don't know whether this is because I'm 4-wheel-drive and therefore high off the ground; nor am I sure whether the way that I got the frequency of the problem _down_ to only once every few months was by getting centered in the lane further back.

The expert on the matter whether you're cycling or motoring - John Forester http://www.JohnForester.com - says that when one of these vehicle-actuated traffic signals fails to detect you, the signal is defective and, therefore, it's legal to treat it as a stop sign, _after_ you've waited long enough to be _sure_ that it's failed to detect you, such as through a full cycle. At this particular light, that generally means when, at around the 4th minute, a vehicle is coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot on the other side of rt. 11 and the light for _his_ direction turns green, stopping the rt. 11 traffic for him but not for you, and then rt. 11 gets the green again and it still stays red for you.

_That's_ when, once every few months, I run it.

But by that, I mean treat it as a stop sign, _not_ _simply_ run it, and here's a textbook example of why: Out of the grand total of about 4 times that I've done so, and out of an about-equal-grand-total number of times that I've happened to see an unlit cyclist who seems to routinely cruise south along rt. 11 sometime around the time that I'm starting the delivery, the timings of _two_ of my runnings of that red light were such that, on both occasions, I would have collided with that unlit cyclist if I had simply hit the accelerator at the moment that I'd decided to go and didn't see any vehicle lights coming, as opposed to made sure to fully treat the red light as a stop sign.

(I only _marginally_ _saw_ the cyclist, both times. That's two separate near-collisions, 6 months or so apart, between probably the same two vehicles, with the same two errors constituting 50%, each, of the cause of each: Failure of a cyclist to use a headlight at night, and failure of an engineer/bureaucrat to make a traffic signal that's not in flash mode do its job of otherwise clarifying right-of-way.)

I imagine that the rest of the carriers are similarly careful when pulling out onto rt. 11 there (i.e. by looking _more_ carefully than the Triad requires, as the Triad only requires one to look for vehicles that have at least one headlight, at night), judging by how long that untriadally-unlit cyclist has lasted.

Indeed, one of the things that it didn't take very long for me to notice when I started being a paper boy, is that the brotherhood of paper carriers consists of generally more law-abiding of drivers than, for example, the brotherhood of bicycle messengers.

That's based on what little I know about bicycle messengers, which admittedly isn't much. All I know is that 1) I witness some of their unnecessary-looking scofflawry on my rare visits to places like Philadelphia, 2) a certain faction of my opponents on the cycling discussion groups (the faction that I've already done some bashing of on this blog) likes to puff up bicycle messengers as a better-than-you-or-me brotherhood and glorify the scofflawry thereof, and 3) there's probably little if anything to be found on the internet that's written by _real_ bicycle messengers, because _real_ bicycle messengers probably don't have time for the mouse-potatoing, and therefore, everything that's written about them by my opponents in (2) (and even by other wannabes, such as myself) can be taken with a grain of salt.

So, in order to learn more, one of the things that I pipe dreamed for 20 years of doing for just a couple of weeks as a vacation sometime (but I've still never gotten around to doing so), was going to be to find some vagrantage somewhere around the waters of New York City that's sufficiently safe for sleeping in my canoe each night (hotel? forget it; that'd eat all of the profits; I want the adventure to be profitable too) and try being a bicycle messenger, just to show that it can be done without the red light running, etc. that messengers are infamous for. Finally, in 2007, I did the next best thing - getting this paper route, a strategy by which I figured I'd learn similar-to-messengering skills (the most-challenging-for-me one of which was the fast, back-to-back address-finding) without having to go any farther from home than Clarks Summit.

A key part of my motive (besides the money), both for the pipe dream and for this version thereof that I finally did, was to "get inside the heads of messengers" so as to be on a more credible pulpit from which to spout my promotions of how universally-applicable my Triadal principles are. And since I lived too far from "real" bicycle-messengering territory to infiltrate them, infiltrating paper carriers would have to do.

And here's what I found: When you're a paper carrier, the other paper carriers (all without even _calling_ their profession a brotherhood; this _blog_ is the only place where _that's_ done, and how much you want to bet bicycle messengers don't either; that too is probably only on the internet) stay behind you not only when you're waiting at a too-long, unnecessary red light. They stay behind you when you're going "only" 100% of the speed limit - which, on the 25 mph section of rt. 11 between the area of the distribution center and W. Grove, is otherwise unheard of.

Therefore, it would seem that this brotherhood of paper carriers (which constitutes the majority of the pre-dawn traffic approaching, from the shopping center where the distribution center is, the particular above-described stupid traffic signal) ought to have an unspoken system (and I think they do, except it seems that the CPA paper boy is exempt from it) of "drafting" each other through that signal:

In one example, if the signal is completely failing to detect a high pickup truck that day, a lower-sprung vehicle might eventually file in behind me and trip the signal for me; that's happened a number of times. In another example, when the signal _is_ detecting the first vehicle that comes along but taking, as always, two minutes to get around to turning green for it, then a vehicle that arrives second (such as myself yesterday) ought to be able to able to have a shorter wait because the vehicle in front has already made the signal start the two-minute countdown.

But did that happen yesterday? No! Not when the vehicle in front is driven by a CPA. The paper-boy CPA simply _ran_ the red light.

Leave it to a CPA.