›› I am the master of red-light camera zen.
Driving in Aurora demands steely focus, cunning and foul language. Those are the rules. Navigating anywhere near the Town Center at Aurora mall, especially during rush hour, requires instincts like Kreskin and expert use of the F-bomb. At any moment, you must be prepared to take your Honda Odyssey from zero to 50 mph in a blink and inject it into the auto chain that never breaks a link on Abilene Street as it approaches East Mississippi Avenue.
While I realize that grueling traffic is just a way of life in Aurora, I find it much more satisfying to blame the river of idiot drivers, whom I draw like a magnet. I’m referring to the timid twits too afraid to do half the speed limit on wide, empty roads and make it impossible to get around them. I’m talking about jerks who recklessly slingshot right into your rear-view mirror at 120 mph on I-225 incinerating you with the halogen lights of a UFO, then hang there at anal-probing distance until you relent and give up the fast lane to drive behind a smoking 1991 GEO Prizm with no back window.
In Aurora, you must have hair-trigger reflexes behind the wheel, ready at a split-second’s notice to steer clear of a couch on the highway, a Lexus piloted by something with a lot of hair and a lot of mobile phone, or the inevitable yahoo that pulls lightning fast right in front of you on Parker Road and then proceeds at 13 miles per hour until you nearly black out from breathless cursing.
Oh, the humanity.
But nothing in Aurora has heightened my reflexes as has the growing number of red-light cameras across the city. Those insidious peepers that strobe brilliant “gotcha” flashes at those who try to squeeze more out of a lemony left-turn arrow than it’s willing to give. Police swear they make Aurora roads safer because we’re being trained to obey the rules of traffic instead of bend them at select Aurora intersections.
What a car-load of crap that is. Nothing is scarier in Aurora than the intersection at East Alameda Avenue and Abilene Street. Since the red-light cameras went up, drivers have rabbit-fast responses to everything at this obscenity, all in hopes of avoiding a caught-in-the-act Polaroid next week in the mail. It means that as soon as a light turns yellow, or even lime-green, people are slamming on the brakes. Or they punch it as they approach the intersection, flying through it at speeds usually reserved for escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity.
I feel a lot of things when I’m at these red-light camera intersections; safer doesn’t come to mind. I can’t overlook that Aurora is raking in about $2.5 million a year from these things. City hoo-haws here and across the state recently helped kill a state effort to ban them. Too bad. Plenty of studies show they make money, and that’s about it.
But here’s the thing. There would be far fewer instances of someone leaving the seat up on the toilet if we just installed cameras there. There would be far fewer speeders if robo-cops were installed strategically on highways. There would be far fewer books misshelved at libraries if there were cameras on every aisle. There would be far fewer diets ruined if there were a webcam inside of every refrigerator. But knowing that I don’t want to live in a world like that, I’m outta here. n