Unfettered Letters

Driving with dog in lap

I would like to know why driving with your dog on your lap is not illegal? I cannot tell you how many times I see this and how hard it is for the driver to drive with their arms oddly trying to turn the wheel to accommodate the dog.
 
It is illegal for drivers to drive with children on their laps. This is just as bad as texting if not worse. This seems like a no-brainer to me.

Angie Lofton
Olathe

Just stop at the light

Cliff Dunn (3/29, Letters) and Paul Smith (4/2, Voices) think it’s a wonderful idea to have “stale” green lights flash before turning to yellow and finally to red. This idea is absurd, as it’s only doing more to help out those who flout public safety laws for their own self-interests.

Between the light changing to yellow through the “double red” (where both lanes have red lights) you have, on average, about five seconds to stop. A car traveling at 45 miles an hour — about the highest speed you’ll see in town — traverses 330 feet in this time, well within the braking distance of any car on the road. You’ve all the time you need to stop.

People are ignoring the lights or just plain not paying attention. Hang up the phone, put down the makeup or the Big Mac, look five seconds down the road, cover the brake, and stop.
 
Brian Straight
 Olathe

‘Stale’ green lights

As I drive around the metro area I see more signs indicating that the intersections have red-light cameras. If public safety were important to the proponents of the cameras, maybe they could alter the green-yellow-red sequence by adding a flashing green a predetermined number of seconds before it changes to yellow. The flashing green would indicate that the green light is “stale.” Stale green lights allow drivers ample time to reduce speed. This would be especially beneficial for big trucks.

Some intersections in the metro area have red-light warning signs some distance back from the intersection. Those are the signs that are illuminated when the intersection ahead will be at a red light as drivers approach the sign. What a great idea! However, I see them installed only at blind intersections such as over the crest of a hill. Those red-light signs must have been quite expensive. Would the flashing green be more cost-effective?

 Why not add the flashing green to all intersections? If someone runs a red light with either the illuminated sign or the flashing stale green, they are without a doubt a scofflaw and deserve a ticket!

Cliff Dunn
Kearney

Seat-belt laws restrain freedom

The Star’s editorial “Time to buckle up” (3/14, Opinion) endorses a change to Missouri House Bill 90 that would allow law enforcement to stop motorists solely for failing to buckle up. The editorial claims that studies have shown changing the law would save an estimated 90 lives per year and would increase road safety without encouraging racial profiling. Does the writer believe that all drivers pulled over and interrogated for no reason make reports to the state Department of Transportation for record?

I don’t encourage drivers to disregard seat-belt laws, which logically increase the safety of passengers in most accidents, but I also don’t promote house bills that would diminish the freedom of adults to make their own decisions.

To make a difference in passenger safety in Missouri, perhaps write an editorial encouraging a bill that would seat-belt the hundreds of thousands of children who ride school buses daily.

Safety is not the real objective for the enhancement of Bill 90.

Greg Hand
Lee’s Summit

Always drive like you’re on camera

All drivers should treat every stoplight as if it were a camera stoplight. Period.

It is a sad time when a camera makes a driver follow the law to slow down and stop at only a few intersections.

Put safety first, period.

Tom Edmondson
Kansas City

Stop at red lights, cameras or not

Wake up, you airheads out there who think leadfoot driving and speeding to your destination are more important than obeying driving laws and preserving human life. I am speaking of the conflict waging over red-light cameras.

If you are not smart enough to stop for red lights or to loan your car to someone who drives sanely, you deserve to pay the $100 ticket issued. What is a $100 fine compared with the possibility of killing someone by running a red light? We have become a nation of selfish “me-firsts.”

Forget changing the cameras already installed. We should be in favor of these at all lights. We need to stop coddling the wrongdoers.

George W. Smiley
Overland Park

Red-light cameras aren’t about safety

If you buy into the propaganda that the recently activated red-light cameras are for your safety, then I have some oceanfront property in Arizona that you might be interested in, too.

According to the Missouri Driver’s Guide, motorists are supposed to stop at yellow lights, but only if it’s safe to do so. However, people are now speeding more excessively than ever through intersections or slamming their brakes to avoid tickets. This type of driving can be more dangerous than running the red light.

It’s no coincidence that the red-light cameras were activated in Kansas City shortly before the announcement of huge budget cuts.

It’s not about your safety; it’s about money.

Eli Noland
Blue Springs

Car crashes are violent

To the people who bemoan Kansas City’s new-found interest in controlling red light runners and not “violent crime” (2/26, Voices), rest assured that a traffic accident is usually extremely violent. And we spend much more time in our cars than we do walking in dark alleys at night in scary neighborhoods.

Roy DeGregory
Prairie Village

Plaza risky for pedestrians

Recently, I caused a traffic accident. Fortunately, I was not breaking any laws or rules of the road. Neither was the cabdriver who was rear-ended.

I was trying to cross 47th Street at Central in my motorized wheelchair. After many cars rushed through the intersection oblivious to the crosswalk, a cabdriver finally stopped for me. As I started across the street, I heard screeching of brakes and saw the driver behind him rear-end him, all because he was following the law by stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Those of us who live in the Country Club Plaza neighborhood witness incidents like mine frequently. Drivers are oblivious to pedestrians trying to cross the street in a crosswalk. Many of us have begged Plaza management, the city and the Police Department to make crosswalks more visible to drivers by striping them, adding signs, giving tickets or even lowering the speed limit.

Will it take an injury, death or a mangled wheelchair for action to be taken to make these streets and crosswalks safer for our citizens?

Susie Haake
Kansas City

‘Left lane limbo’

As annoying as drivers who “stop short” at stoplights are, I have always been perplexed by another paralysis that seems to have afflicted a great many drivers in this area. I call this phenomenon the “left lane limbo” syndrome. When I moved here several years ago from the land of Lincoln, I noticed drivers at intersections with no left turn arrow have extreme difficulty negotiating this maneuver. The secretary of state in Illinois has determined that if you’re adult enough to drive, you should be capable of managing your vehicle through an intersection without an invitation from the car behind you, via several blasts of the horn. So the state has few arrowed-only intersections.

Many drivers in this region, however, will sit through two and sometimes three light cycles until they figure out that we’re not getting any younger and then proceed. Drivers can, with turn signal activated, proceed safely into the intersection and wait for traffic to clear before finishing their left turn.

I encourage all drivers to try this. As well as being efficient, it is also a very “green” maneuver as it saves fuel.

Andy Cooper
Overland Park