Everywhere you look nowadays, cars and trucks and motorcycles and vans are racing up and down the highways, charging ahead to wherever it is they’ve just got to get to right away.
Everywhere, that is, except in Tavistock where, at the main intersection, vehicles of all description are lined up at the village’s new and only traffic lights, day and night, looking as if they’re waiting for the ferry to get back from the other side of the river so they can drive onto it and get off the island.
The lights, which went in at the five-corners’ intersection in downtown Tavistock about two years ago, were supposed to improve traffic flow, reduce danger to pedestrians and, I suppose, bring the village squarely into the latter half of the 20th century. Instead, according to people who live and work there, the lights haven’t done any of the things they were supposed to do, resulting in even more traffic tie-ups, putting pedestrians in more danger than ever and driving Tavistockians (Tavistockites? Tavistockarians?) to distraction.
The lights are also having an effect on the youth who live there. One Grade 3 boy, for example, on his way to school one day, found himself in Grade 4 by time he made it across the intersection.
The authorities – in this case, Oxford County officials – seem stumped when it comes to ways to fix the problem. Removing the lights has been ruled out.
Fortunately, Tavistockinians (Tavistocklanders? Tavistockans?) young and old have lots of good suggestions on what to do about the whole headache.
Here are some of them.
1. Leave the lights where they are and move the village somewhere else. This may be one of the more extreme measures, but given the basement floodings during rainstorms these past couple of years, it might be an idea to move to higher ground somewhere. There’s lots of room in South Easthope Township, for example.
2. Construct parking lots beyond the four entrances to the village – near Shakespeare, Harmony, Hickson and Punkeydoodle’s Corner (and yes, that is an actual place) – and let those having business to do in Tavistock take the subway to the downtown area.
3. Build an overpass across the main intersection. This idea was floated by township councillor Doris Gladding at a council meeting Wednesday. With Canada’s prime minister looking for infrastructure projects to take on, this one might just fill the bill.
4. Require every driver to stop and give a pedestrian a ride across the intersection, dropping him or her off at the other side. This way, the walk signals could be done away with and the traffic flow speeded up.
5. Force all Oxford County officials to drive their vehicles through the intersection five times a day. This idea has potential. The prevailing opinion is that if this was done, a solution to the lights dilemma would be found in a week or two.
Maybe even sooner.
(Tavistockers?)
©1993 Jim Hagarty
