This morning's Sun-Times has a piece on a sensible suburban police solution to an increasing safety concern. Instead of the confrontational stop sign enforcement method (handing out tickets), they've put up a sign beneath some of those big red octagons, reading, "STOP MEANS STOP". It seems to be effectively "guilting" people into coming to a complete halt at otherwise troublesome intersections.
Would that my own community tried this, near my house! The north-south directed streets usually are right-of-way streets, and the east-west oriented ones often have giganto-rama stop signs (no exaggeration. At one intersection, the signs are approximately one meter in diameter, and the base of the sign is nearly two meters above pavement level. You can't miss seeing it... or, if you do, you shouldn't be behind the wheel of an auto). And, yet, in driving the long way to my parents' house (it's less than 2 blocks as the crow flies, but, as the laundry hampers, it's about sixteen leagues, or, about six blocks of fantasizing about having the requisite plumbing in my own home for a washer), I regularly witness people not even slowing down at the cross-streets in front of me.
I know they couldn't have missed seeing me. I'm large, and I usually drive a bright red car with its headlights a-beamin'. I guess they just figure, since I'm not a cop, they can get away without obeying the letter and spirit of the law right there in front of me, and nothing will happen. So far, they're right. But next time I pay my gullibility tax and receive my lottery ticket, and I therefore win (yeah, I'm holding my breath. Sure. ya betcha), I will buy me a series of junker cars (preferably early-to-mid 1970s Fords), and I will feel no compulsion to slow down to cut them some slack. I will plow right into them, take my ticket and pay my fine for failure to reduce speed to avoid an idiot, and go fetch my next street tank.
When you dream, dream big.
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