Back when Phoenix, Arizona had traffic lights


I'd like to invite you to time-travel with me and take a journey of imagination. We're going back to a time when traffic lights were common. I've chosen Phoenix, Arizona, specifically a suburb called "Peoria" in 2021.

Since traffic lights haven't been needed for many years now, I know that it puzzles many people, especially you young ones, so I'll see if I can describe what they were all about, and what they did. I will ask you to show respect for my white hairs, and please rest assured that I'm not making this up. There are people who remember these, even people younger than me.

In those days, cars were not self-driving, people had to control them, and one of the things that they had to do was to come to a stop for a red light. There was a color system, and red meant stop, yellow meant caution, and green meant go. People had to look at these colored lights, and either stop or go, speed up or slow down.

When a red light displayed, the cars had to come to a complete stop and wait while the cars going in the other direction went. Yes, they would sit at intersections just idling, not moving at all, unlike self-driving cars, which of course are always in motion.


Traffic lights were very expensive to install, and maintain. And in Peoria, Arizona, there were traffic lights every half-mile, which meant that cars had to come to a complete stop and wait for the light to change if it was red. A green light (as shown above) meant that cars did not need to stop. You can still hear this expression used nowadays, for example if a movie project is "green-lighted" it means that it can proceed. That's where that phrase comes from.

People just took traffic lights for granted. Every half-mile or so they would just come to a complete stop and sit there if there was a red light, not moving at all. Cars had not yet developed sensors that they have now, which allows them to move without hitting each other, so this was the best system created for human-controlled cars. Even then it often failed to keep the cars from hitting each other, not due to failure of the traffic light system, but due to human error. If a miscalculation was made by a human driver, even a slight one, the cars could and did hit each other, often with lethal force.

These systems were in place for over one hundred years, so you can see them in old photos, and old movies, going back to before the 1920s. And while we may scoff at this primitive technology, it's important to remember that it was the best that could be done at the time. That was then and this is now.

Thank you for taking a look at traffic lights with me!
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