Red light green light

A block from our house is a major intersection. There is a fender bender there almost every day caused by people who run the red light. It is an easy-to-understand intersection, not apt to be confusing for sober drivers. So why do we keep hearing Screech! Bang! and then sirens? Maybe cell phones (they should build in a GPS interface to shout STOP! in the ears of people who are gabbing and about to run a light), but I think it has more to do with a growing self-centeredness, a panic-stricken need everyone feels to get where they think they have to go and do it quickly. People will wait at a stop sign for about one and a half minutes (I've timed them) to let a steady stream of traffic go by. As their personal time limit approaches, they get less and less risk-averse and at approximately 1 1/2 minutes they will floor it and pull out in front someone. Their traffic sense has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with their stress level. Same thing with red lights--when you gotta go you gotta go and there just has to be enough room to squeeze one more vehicle through that yellow. Or I suppose there are more and more who are psychologically unable to tolerate any impediments to their course and whose brains actually don't even perceive the traffic light--a sort of repression of any possibility that they might have to slow down. In a way it is pretty amazing that our culture is so law-abiding to have invented the traffic light at all. Why aren't there crossing bars that descend at red lights like RR crossings? Those are a 19th century thing, probably came about that way to make sure the rubes driving haywagons would stop since the powers-that-were figured that it was impossible to educate them about what a warning light meant. I think we now have a pretty large population of rubes, people who are impossible to educate or reach by any traditional means and don't really understand what it means to get T-boned at Zimmerman Trail. There will likely be crossing bars there someday, then we'll know we really have to move away.