The light turned green, the guy in front of me kept staring at his lap, and I got to sit through the whole thing again. Twice. That’s not traffic, that’s a hostage situation.
Here’s what I think is happening. A red light has become a free pause button for some drivers. Phone comes out, eyes go down, and the rest of the world quietly stops existing. Green shows up and nobody told them. Meanwhile there are eight of us behind that car, each one doing the math on how long the next cycle is going to take.
Traffic engineers already build a little slop into every green. The standard assumption, as far as I can tell from the textbooks, is about two seconds of start-up lag as the front of the line gets moving. Two seconds is fair. Humans need a beat. What I’m describing is the guy who needs fifteen, and every second he burns is a second the cars behind him don’t get back. A green light is a shared resource. You’re spending everybody else’s.
Now the caveat, because I’d rather not get letters. I’m not telling you to floor it the instant the color changes. Look both ways first. Somebody coming the other direction may have decided the red was more of a suggestion, and the numbers back that up: the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety counted 1,119 people killed in red-light-running crashes in 2024, and about half of them were pedestrians, cyclists, or people in other vehicles who did nothing wrong. Those are folks who had the green.
So the rule is simple, and it fits in one breath. Green means check the intersection, then go. Not check Instagram, then check the intersection, then remember you’re driving.
I get that red lights feel like dead time. They aren’t. They’re the one moment the whole system asks you to wait so it can move everybody efficiently, and the only thing it asks in return is that you notice when the wait is over. If you can’t manage that, the problem isn’t the light.
I’d even argue it’s a courtesy that costs nothing. You don’t have to be fast. You have to glance up. Anyone who’s ever been stuck behind a person who didn’t knows exactly what that glance is worth.
My two cents: your phone will still be there after you’ve cleared the intersection, so look up when the light changes and drive.
Photo by Tony Webster via Openverse, licensed CC BY-SA.