I am officially offering a bounty. I will personally buy a coffee, a pastry, and lunch for whoever can find the person in charge of programming the traffic lights in this town and ask them what on earth they have against us. Because I am convinced there is a guy in a room somewhere just manually flipping switches to red specifically to watch us suffer.

Can we talk about the left-turn arrows for a minute? I timed it yesterday. I literally sat there, pulled out my phone, and timed the left-turn green arrow. Three seconds. THREE. SECONDS. That is enough time for exactly one minivan, and maybe the front bumper of the car behind them, to make it through before it turns red again. Meanwhile, the opposite side of the highway gets a green light for four uninterrupted minutes while the road is completely empty!

What is the result? People have to pull out into the dead center of the intersection, wait for the light to turn red, and then make a run for it just so they can get home before their kids graduate high school. It’s incredibly dangerous, but what choice do we have? You either do that, or you sit at the same intersection for four complete light cycles questioning every decision you’ve ever made in your life.

And the lack of synchronization! We are living in 2026. We have the technology to land rockets backward on floating barges in the middle of the ocean. We have refrigerators that can text us when we are out of milk. But somehow, in Lakewood, New Jersey, the concept of synchronizing three traffic lights in a row is treated like forbidden magic.

If you get a green light at one intersection, it is a mathematical certainty—backed by the laws of physics—that the very next light will turn red exactly 50 feet before you reach it. It’s just a start-stop-start-stop crawl of absolute misery. You hit the gas, you hit the brake. You hit the gas, you hit the brake. It takes 25 minutes to drive a mile and a half.

This is not a population issue. This is not a zoning issue. This is a literal “somebody needs to plug a laptop into the metal box on the corner and update the software” issue. This is completely, 100% fixable.

We are wasting millions of hours of our lives and thousands of gallons of gas just idling at red lights staring at empty cross streets. Call the DOT. Call the township. Recalibrate the sensors. Give us a 15-second left-turn arrow so more than one human being can turn onto a side street. Bring our traffic grids into the 21st century before we all lose our collective minds.

SG

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