BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter from reader Dennis Miner is about local drivers not stopping at red lights.
This is a test: When you are driving your car or truck and the traffic light in front of you turns yellow and then red, what do you do?
I seem to recall from all the driving tests I've taken over the past 62 years that you are to stop!
Did rules change and nobody told me that you are to disregard those who now have the green light and you must gun the engine and go through the yellow/red lights and must do so at a high rate of speed, so if you do crash it will be devastatingly big? It's probably the other guy's fault anyway.
Now, I realize that occasionally you may make a mistake and run a red – or don't get on the brakes soon enough and end up in the middle of the intersection. I have done it myself and felt very bad about it, too.
Today, like almost every other day, at the corner of Big Bay Point Road and Hurst/Pine, I watched in amazement as two cars on Big Bay Point went through the red two seconds after it was a full red for them and green for me, and less than five minutes later the same thing happened at Prince William Way and Big Bay Point Road, only the light had been red for at least five seconds.
I wait at a green for two to five seconds before moving, so if you are the person behind me, go ahead and blow your horn, shoot me the bird and call me those fancy names you like to use. I don't care! I don't want to be in an insurance claim.
This is a regular activity on Big Bay Point Road, with 7 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 6 p.m. being notably the worst times. I guess we are all too busy to have to follow rules of the road.
Maybe it's time for the city to invest in some red-light cameras along with those speed ones they are installing. Maybe I could attach a potato cannon to my car and blast them when I see it happen!
Or maybe, just maybe, we could all just drive properly.
Just a thought, but I like the potato cannon idea.
Dennis Miner
Barrie
