traffic lights

When I was little, when we came to a pelican crossing, my Mum used to hold my hand and say "Now watch for the green man and then we can cross."
So I always used to watch out for a man with green skin to walk down the road and wave to us so we could cross.
I was puzzled as to why it never happened.

Jen

I used to believe that the yellow light in traffic-lights meant Go Faster!

M. L. E.

When I was very young (3-4) I use to think there were little men/creatures/elves...whatever you want to call them...that lived in traffic lights and they were responsible for changing the colors. I can remember getting stuck at a really long red light and I was sitting in the backseat thinking..."Gosh, this guy is NOT doing his job! He must be asleep..." Silly me!

Amanda

I used to think that ALL traffic lights were controlled by ONE person!!! I thought that it must be such a hard job to work out which lights had to be what colours!!! I eventually thought that they just each turned red, orange or green for 1 minuite...I only learnt in year 9 that sensors were used!!!

hard work!!!

I used to believe that at every traffic intersection where there was a stoplight, that there was a man inside of the home or building on the corner who watched the traffic all day long. He would be the one to make the stoplights work.

Barbara G.

I used to belive there were people under the traffic lights, otherwise they wouldn't work...

Anon

I used to believe that I could predict the green left turn lights and that the color was determined by the fairies that lived inside of them. I would tell my dad whether it was going to be arrow shaped or just a green circle and tell him that I was magic whenever I was correct. It wasn't until I was ten that I noticed the giant "LEFT TURN SIGNAL" signs on the light poles that I "predicted" at.

Brianne

For a very long time I believed that there were little men underground that changed the traffic lights!

Melissa

I used to think that traffic lights knew if you really wanted to go past them or not.

This is influenced by my older sister, who told me this when driving me to the mall when I was little. :]

ME!

When i was a little kid a believed that when we stood at a red traffic light with our car, i have to beg of it that it becomes green. Not in spoken words but in my thoughts. So i always spoke with the traffic light in my thoughts. Some of them needed some time to be to be persuaded (i thought they had a bad day or something), but eventually they all indulged.


[To the site-owner who reads this first: I'm german, so my english is not the best. Please feel free to correct my spelling! Thanks, great site btw :)]

Florian

I used to beleive that underneath the traffic lights there used to be a man in an underground room with three switches on for stop,go and prepar to stop!

Brendan

A friend and I, when we were about eight years old, if we found ourselves sitting in the car stopped at a traffic light, would chant "Red light, red light, turn turn GREEN!" to make the light change. If it didn't change immediately we'd start in with "Please? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?" until it changed.

I'm not sure if I actually ever believed that it was working, or if I knew in the back of my mind that by the time we got impatient and started the ritual, it would be time for the light to change anyways. I strongly suspect that she really did believe in our powers of persuasion over traffic lights.

Brenda

I used to believe that at dusk someone would turn on a switch that would give traffic lights more power so the red, yellow and green could shine brighter, so drivers could see them better. After all, it was dark, and the lights looked brighter to me. Near sun-up, I believed that they would turn the power back down so the lights would not be as bright during daylight, because they didn't need to be.

And this was long before any energy crisis.

Vicki J.

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of Star Trek. So, to me, it seemed perfectly plausible that a man in an invisible bubble was sitting above each and every intersection, waiting for cars to show up so he could change the color of the lights.

B-Dog

When I was little I thought that my dad had the ability to guess when the traffic light would turn green. He would start counting down, "3... 2... 1..." and then almost every time the light turned green. I'd try to guess, too, but I was almost always wrong. It wasn't until I was about 12 that I realized that all you have to do is look at the light going the opposite direction, and start counting when it turns yellow...

Anon

I always knew that the beeping noise traffic lights made when you cross the street was to alert blind people - but for the longest time i just assumed it was to warn the blind drivers so they wouldn't run anyone over!!

Sophie

I used to believe that I could change street lights with my mind

Anon

I used to think that there were full sized men curled up inside of the traffic lights who switched the lights from red to green.

Casey