Traffic Lights

So I had never seen this before. I was heading home from work waiting to cross the street at a busy pedestrian controlled intersection. The lights will stay green in the direction with more traffic for about two minutes and then the other direction for about 30 seconds so I could tell something was wrong when I noticed the very large backlog of cars and the green light did not appear to want to change in the non-busy direction.

This unfortunately made for a very dangerous and frustrating situation. Cars coming from the non-busy direction see a green light and go to head right through, whereas the other cars stuck at the red light began to get frustrated and tried to make it across the intersection. I also had to make a dash across the intersection to make it to the bus stop, though it was somewhat pointless since the bus would be stopped at the red light when it did finally come.

There were a few close calls but I didn't see any accidents happen and no pedestrians got run over. After a few minutes the lights magically started working again, it was very bizarre. Afterward I thought it would have been a much better story if I had walked into the middle of the intersection and started directing traffic. Instead it's just a Matt story.

Also on the topic of traffic lights a fun thing to do this is press the cross walk button once and then stand very close to the button. It amuses me because of the people that love to press the button over and over or the people that think I'm an idiot and didn't press the button at all. Yes I did, just wait.