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Commentary: Impatient for red lights to turn green in my direction

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When I was in my mid-teens, Bill Stulla hosted a kids’ TV show called “Cartoon Express.”

I was more than a little too old for the show, but somehow I and my friends learned of the milk-drinking game commonly called “Red Light, Green Light.”

I remember playing it on Balboa when my parents chaperoned some of us there for a week. At 16, my friends and I were still drinking milk when we ate our Wheaties.

When it was my turn to be Engineer Bill, it was fun to make the green lights short and the red lights long.

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I used to work for a firm of traffic engineers. When Lee and I first moved to Corona del Mar in 2002, we were thrilled at the way traffic moved.

“Sneaky Pete” right-turn lanes and 50- and 55-mph speed limits. And what my traffic engineer employer referred to as “responsive” traffic signals. They changed green for waiting drivers when there was no interfering traffic.

What a concept!

The light at Crown Drive and San Joaquin Hills Road seemed to respond to the click of my fingers.

I used to joke that Gelson’s paid for a responsive signal at the corner of San Miguel Drive and San Joaquin Hills for the convenience of its customers.

Then, the road work. Lots of long-lasting road work. After which, no more green-light convenience for shoppers stopping at Rite-Aid, the dry cleaners, or Gelson’s on their way home.

Turning left in any direction at San Miguel and San Joaquin, you could contemplate the sunset and what’s for dinner and who might be playing the Angels tonight — while there is no traffic in any direction and you have to wait for an eventual spurt of oncoming traffic from MacArthur to pass through the intersection before you’ll get the green arrow.

These days, a left turn at MacArthur and San Joaquin, and then at San Miguel and San Joaquin, can take five minutes.

Really? Yes.

Think of all that wasted gas!

I learned to take Bonita Canyon Drive/Ford Road/San Miguel coming home and, if it wasn’t time for moms to pick up their children at Harbor Day School, turn onto Pacific View Drive from San Miguel, where you at least don’t have to wait for an arrow.

But at Marguerite Parkway and San Joaquin, the last previously responsive signal has now capitulated to some random signal design.

I assume it is not just CdM dwellers but all of Newport Beach that has the irritating problem of waiting and waiting for lights to change. I seem to notice it most on my trips near home.

And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t facing left-turn lanes both move at the same time?

OK, I sound like I am having a tantrum, even though I am grown up, or at least an adult. I don’t drink milk anymore. And when it’s my turn at the traffic signals, I want the red lights to be short and the green lights to be frequent, or at least consistent. Preferably, responsive.

Come on, city of Newport Beach, traffic engineers! Please give some attention to this stressful, gas-wasting, time-wasting situation!

LIZ SWIERTZ NEWMAN lives in Corona del Mar.

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