Traffic Light

THE traffic light lingered red as the motorcycles congregated at a crowded downtown intersection -- engines revving, drivers fidgeting. Dozens more filtered through the idling cars to the makeshift starting line and soon there were 60 cycles in all, buzzing like angry insects. Then the light turned green and chaos ruled. In a renegade roar of noise and smoke, they were off.

Simi Valley police have acquired another tool to more safely nab motorists who zip through red lights. Typically, traffic officers are positioned behind a motorist when a violation occurs and then give chase through the intersection, raising the level of danger. Now the city has installed blue lights, known as tattle-tells, on signals at five of its busiest intersections. When a light turns red, a blue light on the opposite side of the signal flashes on.

Re "She Has World at Her Not-So-Fleet Feet," April 14 Mayvis Coyle did not get a ticket for violating the law against not completely crossing an intersection before the traffic signal changed to "Don't Walk." There is no such law. She and the officer simply have a difference of opinion as to whether the signal already read "Don't Walk" when she entered the intersection. Her situation is the same as that of a driver who receives a ticket for entering an intersection when the light was red but who claims the light was green at the time of entering the intersection.

Marci Vogel's fictional account of her relationship with Victor and his 1976 Toyota longbed truck was more reality than fiction to me ("Go," California Story, Feb. 19). First, my daughter's nickname is Go. We usually call her Mogo since her name is Monique. When she was old enough to talk, she would immediately and forcefully say, "GO!" whenever she was in our car and the traffic light turned from red to green. She's been going anywhere she could drive or fly to ever since she was a teen, going on three decades now. Second, I have a 1988 longbed Toyota truck with just about the same mileage as Victor's: 172,000.

After years of trying to make the roads safer, Santa Rosa Valley residents have agreed to tax themselves to pay for street improvements aimed at better controlling traffic through their rural community near Camarillo. The Ventura County Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday to form an assessment district into which property owners will pay to add four signal lights to Santa Rosa Road, a two-lane, six-mile stretch of road in an unincorporated area bordered by homes, farms, nurseries and ranchettes.

A dispute between bureaucrats and elected officials, and questions about funding have prevented Los Angeles from replacing traffic signals that go dead during blackouts with ones that can operate on backup batteries, according to interviews and documents. During the power outage Monday, traffic signals went dark in areas affected by the blackout. When power was restored, some lights blinked red until they could be reset by city signal operators.

Is it really possible to get a signal installed on your hazardous street corner? Play The Traffic Game and find out. The Rules: Take your place at the starting line, roll a die and advance the number of squares shown on it. Follow directions on the square. Unless you qualify for a shortcut, you can't pass any Green Square without landing directly on it, because each Green Square represents a necessary step in the city's process for approving a traffic signal.

The improvements by the various cities cited in "These Routes Aren't Made for Walking" (Dec. 3) are going in the right direction. However, it seems that the only sure way to reduce pedestrian deaths is to add a separate pedestrian cycle to traffic signals at intersections. During this cycle, all signals would be red for cars, and only the pedestrian signal would be green. The penalty for violators would be a heavy fine and mandatory imprisonment. Pedestrians would be allowed sufficient time to cross the intersection in any direction, including diagonally.

The city of Los Angeles has fallen behind in meeting a two-year-old requirement by the state to replace old and burned-out traffic signals with energy-efficient lights amid a squabble over who should pay for the work, officials said Tuesday. The delay has forced officials to scramble to avoid having some signals go dark and to head off potential legal action by the state.

ON THE afternoon they met, Ronny Cammereri and Loretta Castorini made love. They walked up the stairs of the Italian bakery where daily he toiled and sweated and brooded and raged, and they went straight to his apartment just behind the building. She downed two whiskeys, forced him to eat a rare steak she cooked; he stood, stiff-armed everything off the kitchen table, grabbed her and carried her to his bed while she pretended she had no choice but to give in to the bad luck of her impulses.