Sometimes we’re lucky. Sometimes simple, everyday occurrences suggest solutions. I bet the first wise guy who saw a round rock rolling down a hill took out a patent on the wheel. And the tree that fell across the ravine? Aha, a bridge.
Or take Sir Isaac Newton for example. He’s sitting under that well known apple tree, reading an erotic novel of the day (”Her lips almost touched his willing ear as she whispered prohibited promises”) when an apple bops him on the head. Eureka, GRAVITY! The fruit of the apple tree and an inflamed imagination engendered celestial mechanics.
Now, don’t laugh, for I have found a perfect 21st century analogy — as simple as that apple — for the legal mess we’ve made of individual rights versus the cohesion of the state. I refer to that most banal of examples, the traffic light, that three-eyed cyclops that legislates, via its signals, our freedom to move through a busy intersection.
My friend, Herb, says he never met a traffic light he liked. “They’re just like laws. Lousy ones never get dismantled and they clutter up the intersections of my life.” The last piece of legislation Herb respected was the Magna Carta.
“And when’s the last time you saw a traffic light removed?” he adds. “About the last time a Moslem was voted president of the Southern Baptist Association. Traffic lights and laws — as irreversible as a speeding bullet.”
When was the last time you saw a traffic light dismantled with an apology in the paper?
“Motorists, me and my staff are really sorry about the 5-minute light we put on the corner of Gran Prix Boulevard and Old Rural Lane. Your bomb threats have convinced us. It’s a bummer. (We just couldn’t resist the 2-for-1 special from ACME Signal Corporation.) We’ll take it down tomorrow evening (during rush hour, naturally). There’ll be free beer for all. And glass and metal fragments will be dispensed as souvenirs. Again, apologies to you patient Gran Prix travelers. If anybody lived on Old Rural Lane, we’d apologize to them, too.”
Traffic signals and laws should both attend to the delicate equilibrium between society and individual freedom. The stoplight that stacks up traffic on the 8-lane parkway is there to allow the several residents of Serenity Lane to get out into the world. For them it’s freedom, but for the 10,000 whose parkway progress is disturbed daily, it’s a pain in the transmission. Trouble is, to cite a political analogy, there’s a constituency for Serenity Lane and not for the 8-lane parkway.
One Wednesday night long ago, before the expressway was encumbered by traffic lights, those frustrated Serenity Laners gathered at the municipal council meeting and raised the devil about the mortal danger of the Parkway/Serenity Lane intersection. They spoke loudly about death and destruction, and waved signs. Tattooed on their brow was: “We wanta traffic light.”
Noisy voters bonded by a common cause, who wave signs and write letters to editors, often get their way — their own traffic light. This Serenity Lane community who dream of easy access to the world outside their environs are, in the classic sense of the word, a special interest group. And city planners have to please vocal constituents; especially sign wavers who write letters to editors. Result? A new light quicker than Emeril can throw a handful of cumin in his simmering stew.
Think any of the expressway users who are scattered all over the county dropped in at the meeting? Nope. They are geographically and politically dispersed. About as cohesive as pebbles on a beach. Therefore, they will pay the price for Serenity Lane’s activism: a two-minute delay on the way to work. Not so terrible. But if the natural process of pleasing special interest groups adjacent to the expressway continues. . . well, the expressway is no longer an expressway. It’s a thicket of lights. Gridlock — like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
And even when it’s congealed into a parking lot, not one of the Serenity Lane folks is going down to city hall to sacrifice their highway access for the great good of the commuting multitudes. Thats human nature.
Such observation tells us that the statist solution of three vertical giant eyes doesn’t work. But what about a 4-way stop, you ask; a modified form of Laissez Faire capitalism. We all need to traverse this intersection, but we’re not free to speed through without attention to our fellow motorists. Forget altruism. Gunning through the traffic node can result in delay or death due to a broken head, a crushed thorax, or worse. The price of automotive aggression goes sky high. If you’re lucky, you may only suffer a 5,000 dollar collision and a 2-hour delay filling out forms followed by months of confinement in an institution where the windows are barred. So, we stop and look. We compromise. citizens balance their own needs with the desires of others. The 4-way stop is a perfect model, a thermostatic, self-regulating solution. If we disregard the rights of other drivers, we’ll end up either fiscally or physically damaged. Just like life, I’m thinking. Hey, why not fire the municipal traffic engineer, dismantle the traffic lights, sell them as souvenirs to hang in the dens of liberated motorists and install a bunch of cheap, simple, freedom-friendly 4-way stops. That’s Libertarian heaven.
