Citizen complaint of the day: Masshole applying blush while barreling through a red light in Roslindale

That is absolutely not true!! Maybe you don't understand how pedestrian signals work. WALK means step off the curb and NOTHING more. The Flashing Don't Walk (plus a few seconds of steady don't walk) is what must be legally timed to get you from curb to curb using 3.5 feet/second. This is how it is done - per the book (MUTCD - Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices - a federal document). Walk can be 7 seconds minimum - it is for reaction time to see WALK and then step off. It can be longer but has nothing to do with timing for getting you across the street. No one in the city is conspiring to break the law or shorten crossing times.

The city is chock full of what I call "Don't walk / No Reason" signal timings, in which "Don't Walk" is displayed for portions of the cycle during which no traffic could legally proceed through the crosswalk.

For example, where a one-way side street enters a main street in a T intersection signed "no turn on red", the pedestrians crossing the side street have a "Don't Walk" light while the light controlling traffic entering from the side street is red.

I suspect there's a circular problem here: nobody in the city pays much attention to getting the pedestrian signals working correctly because most pedestrians ignore them, and most pedestrians learn to ignore the signals because so many of them are set up incorrectly.

Do you mean residents? Pols? Speedway enthusiasts?

Yeah, there is absolutely interest to make the streets safer in this city by any means, pedestrians and cyclists are sick and tired of almost being killed by motorists. But when meaningful road diets an changes are proposed (what up West Roxbury tools) people come out of the woodwork to fight against and so you say to them, whats YOUR solution to curbing road violence?

Usually its crickets, blaming cyclists, blaming pedestrians, blaming traffic engineers. They don't have a real answer, they just want to get where they are going, as fast as possible, everyone else be damned and don't you dare take away my free parking.

BPD doesn't do anything to combat road violence, they do not do traffic enforcement and when they do, its just security theater. Or they're pulling over cyclists to hand out helmets and lights, awesome, that'll help my torso when it gets crushed by a distracted driver right hooking me.

And of course we can petition our elected officials to push for heavier penalties and insurance surcharges.

But again, the whining of the car lobby will rear its ugly head even more in light of that.

It should be a $200 fine on first offense. $500 and 6 month suspension on second. Let's start acting like people's lives matter more than stupid criminal drivers and their vehicles.

And who said anything about being safe and non-aggressive, they were just stopping because they know running a red has consequences now.

Kinda the point isn't it?

In the mid 1980s, you could get info on up to three plates at a time.

Some of my housemates did a beer run in Kenmore Square and were walking back to the house when they were accosted by some suburban mooks who jumped out of a car with a baseball bat. The assholes stole the beer under threat of violence, but what they didn't know was that their plate could be traced.

One of the victims went to the registry and got the address that the plate was registered to. They then went to the post office and changed the address to somewhere in North Dakota. This routed all their real mail away from their residence.

Next, since junk mail didn't forward, the victims collected some of those old business reply cards used to request information on various sorts of random things, from stamp collections to powerwashers to scams. They passed them out at a monthly house meeting so people could fill them out while the meeting was going on. This meant that their junk mail load would multiply extensively.

I don't know if the violent beer stealing suburban jackasses ever understood why this happened, but it was sweet revenge at a time when cops routinely turned a blind eye to armed robbery and not getting your paper bill to make your car and credit payments could be a real problem.

Haven't talked to one in a while but it seems that 5-10 years ago they could get this info....