Congratulations to Paul Marcellin for Winning the August 2024 Barefoot Writing Challenge! (Your $100 prize is on its way!)
The challenge was to write an essay that answered this prompt:
August is National Inventors Month. What new invention would you like to create and how would it be used?
Paul painted a relatable story about traffic light hassles. Enjoy his winning submission:
I’m in a long line of cars (again). There’s a red light way up ahead, and I can feel my precious life evaporating atom by atom while we all wait for green.
Worse: While my soul’s eroded drip by drip of legal compliance, the road that has the green light — that we’re all waiting for — has zero traffic flow, nothing.
We’re all in this queue of misery waiting for nothing.
What’s going on?
The very first traffic light that we’d recognize today was installed in Detroit in 1920. It was a revolution of productivity, removing the requirement for police-manned intersections to keep things ticking along safely.
It’s 104 years later, and there’s a squillion of these “robots” installed across the planet. But… I’m not so sure about that productivity thing anymore.
Where an intersection has a consistently even balance of traffic density in both the north-south and the east-west flows, all is good. Keep those machines blinking through their merry control cycles, and our world keeps moving, sort of.
And we all feel okay, sort of.
But. When, for example, the traffic demand in the north-south flow is considerably denser than the east-west, we must do better. We can’t have 100 cars stop and wait for 10 — or none! — going the other way.
Of course, if there were an officer manning the intersection rather than a dumb light, that person would easily assess that the demand excess in the north-south flow warrants a (much) longer cycle for that direction than the east-west. So, he or she would manage the traffic accordingly, continually adjusting for the dynamics of the density variance.
We’re not going to be replacing traffic lights with humans, obviously. But I’m certain we can make the lights behave more like humans, and with all of the low-cost tech available these days, surely it’s not too difficult.
Here’s my idea:
At each relevant intersection the city installs the new “super light” (SL).
An SL has a mini-brain: a tiny processor plus camera/s or other suitable method/s to understand traffic density in each direction plus communication links with the other SLs so that they all have knowledge of what’s happening up- and downstream.
The SL behaves more like a rational human than a dumb light-robot, assessing circumstances and creating priority flows until matters return to equilibrium.
Ahh.
We all get home with a little more soul intact.
