The traffic light chaos and the effects on traffic

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It’s time to stand up for the traffic lights. In most cases it does reasonable work, is largely reliable, predictable and close to the people. And even if we sometimes get annoyed about the wrong timing and the traffic lights even fail here and there, every color still serves our survival, at least if you follow its instructions. Did you know that the traffic light is celebrating a big birthday this year?

Messrs. Lester Wire and Garrett Morgan are said to have put the world’s first electric traffic light into operation in Cleveland in 1914. It would be like a serious political short-circuit if one drew a direct line from the police officer Wire and his inventor friend Morgan from Ohio to the injustice that we are experiencing 110 years later with a traffic light that is also quite lively and therefore possibly soon is switched off.

By the way, it is impossible to make such a connection because the traffic light in Cleveland only showed two colors, red and green. Despite all the supposed genius, it would be daring to assume that Mister Wire and Mister Garrett knew that a third color would only lead to a lot of trouble.

What is more interesting in this context is that the first traffic light in Berlin, a replica of which can be seen today at Potsdamer Platz, showed red for standing and green for walking. However, the third color, pure white, signaled that pedestrians were allowed to cross the street. And at the top of the traffic light tower, as the historian Hanno Hochmuth tells it in his latest book about Berlin, there was a police officer who was supposed to help “ensure that the new traffic light was shown enough respect.” Yes, a Schupo like that, that would be something…

The traffic light explosion

Back to the facility in Cleveland: “The traffic lights and the associated reporting triggered a traffic light boom in many parts of the world.” This is what it says on the specialist website Ingenieur.de. Those political tinkerers who have been trying to make their traffic lights shine for three years now can only dream of this sentence. No boom, anywhere. It is feared that it will suffer the same fate as a previous model in London that was powered by gas: This presumably very first traffic light exploded and was no longer usable.

However, for the sake of future road users, we should not only think about what the traffic lights can do for us, but also what we can do for them. Because reporting on the political traffic lights also damages the traffic lights and their authority. You can now constantly see images accompanying some political texts (for example in… star) Traffic lights hanging crookedly from their poles or dangling from unattached cables; you see traffic lights with shattered glass, excitedly flashing traffic lights or completely blackened traffic lights. But who should take the traffic light seriously as a kind of immobile executive of traffic law if it degenerates into a symbol of decay and dysfunction?

In the past, generations grew up who only knew Helmut Kohl or Angela Merkel as Chancellor. Today we are raising children who have never seen the national soccer team in the semi-finals of a major tournament – and who cross intersections as they please because they no longer take a traffic light seriously, no matter what color it is.