OMAHA, NE—Friday afternoon brought a bizarre turn of events when every vehicle at the intersection of Cuming Street and N 20th Street failed to acknowledge the green lights in front of them, delaying traffic flow for several minutes.
According to pedestrian witnesses, at approximately 2:40 p.m., the northbound traffic light changed from green to yellow, and then from yellow to red, indicating that north- and southbound traffic should stop moving. The attentive drivers did cease their forward motion, but as the east- and westbound traffic lights along Cuming Street turned to green, nothing happened.
There were several cars at the intersection, from all directions. However, despite multiple lanes having green signals, not a single vehicle entered the intersection.
Passerby Ruby Fitzgerald, 45, was walking to a friend's house at the time, and was waiting to cross the street when she noticed the lack of motion. "I [have] never seen anything like it," she explained. "Just a bunch of cars and trucks sitting there in the road, running, but not moving."
The standstill ensued for several more seconds, causing Fitzgerald to further inspect what was happening. She saw that every person in each car was staring at their cellular phone, as if in a trance, apparently taking no notice of the traffic signal ahead of them.
"Every one of them!" she exclaimed. "Even the passengers, in every single car at the crossroads were just staring at those screens, like they [had] been hypnotized."
This pattern persisted for 4 complete cycles of traffic lights until one driver honked briefly, drawing the attention of all present to the task at hand. Each person then broke their blinkless stare with their phone, and as if coming out of a coma, took note of their surroundings. Then, apparently realizing where they were, they directed their eyes toward their respective traffic signals, causing the photons emitted therefrom to collide with photoreceptors on their retinae, which were, in turn, transduced into chemo-electrical impulses and sent to the visual cortex, and eventually interpreted as color. The recognition of those colors led to eventual connections with their meaning, given the situation, and the drivers then took the appropriate action: namely, maintaining pressure on the braking mechanism, or exerting pressure on the propelling pedal.
Although it is not uncommon for the occasional driver to get distracted adjusting the radio, or inspecting something outside while waiting for a traffic light to change, this was a statistical anomaly, according to Stanford statistician Joseph Hartley, 45. "The chances of that many drivers being that stuck to their phones for that long are just incredible. I'd find it more believable if they had all driven into some kind of wormhole in the intersection. I can't explain this."
One proposed intervention to ensure that such things do not happen in the future is to play a loud, obnoxious tone as each light turns green. Proponents argue that this should suffice to remind drivers that they are, in fact, operating vehicles and not sitting at home on their couches. However, critics maintain that such noise would only disturb nearby residents, wake sleeping babies in vehicles and nearby homes, and also keep drivers from finishing their text messages about cute things the cat did that day.
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