i live in a little suburb in a little city in the south pacific. recently while walking about the burb and driving about the town, i’ve noticed all these new traffic lights. lots of them. really. lots. they’ve just been springing up all over the place. not just in the little burb i play in, but just down the road from it, and in and around the city, and probably outside the city - but i haven’t been out there to check.

at first i thought it was a great move of some urban safety initiative from the council to back the research they had been carrying out on why pedestrians cross roads without waiting for the cross signal or, without even walking to a designated cross location. but then i realised that adding more traffic lights wasn’t going to make people cross at them, unless the pavements were littered with them, but even then it wouldn’t make people wait for the green man, and you’d need to climb over them to cross the road.

so then i had this council conspiracy; councilor invests in traffic light company, sales of traffic lights to council triple! or something like that. there seemed a while back to be a roundabout infestation; any road that meet another road, no matter how casually, had to have a roundabout on it. roundabouts seemed the birth control of intersections. i had smelled a hint of conspiracy there, but thought that there was probably just some money left in the budget, and roundabouts were cool somewhere in the world that urban planners paid attention to.

then i released the truth. the traffic lights contain little green men and the roundabouts are their spaceships. nuff said.