Cheap entertainment is hard to find when you reach my age.
As we were getting ready to walk the trail near our residence, a City of Des Moines police car was sitting on the curb in front of our house. I told Stephanie that the officer must have found a nice spot to do his paperwork. All of sudden he took off quickly, turned on his flashing overhead panel lights, and made a left turn at the corner. Hardly anyone turns left at that corner.
Since my back was hurting too badly to walk on that day, we returned home. We drove the Explorer to the store three blocks away rather than worry about injuring my back further. Upon returning from the store, the squad car was in front of our house once again. And again, he peeled out, engaging his lights, and turned left at the corner. We realized that the police officer was chasing cars that failed to stop, or even slow down, at a stop sign on the corner of the block not more than 150 feet from our property.
Years ago, the neighborhood group, Stephanie, I and several neighbors worked for twenty months to get a couple of stop signs at the corner. Without the stop signs, vehicles would race from one end of the street on the south side to the far northern limit of the street on the north side. There is a day care facility situated on the corner. The street is level with a length that comes just short of a half-mile. There are no connecting streets on the east side (it’s a community green space), and there are four feeder streets on the west side. Naturally, with two used car dealerships and an auto repair shop on the south end of the street, it was a testing ground in which potential car buyers and auto mechanics attempted to set Craig Breedlove’s land speed records.
It wasn’t city hall that fought us as much as the bureaucrats that seem to be the deciders about where stop signs may be placed. It took the death of a young motorcycle rider traveling at a high rate of speed down the road to get the Des Moines City Council to overrule the paper-pushers and vote to have stop signs placed at the corner.
At first, there was a mix of people who saw the signs from a safe distance and stopped. A few drivers drove through the area as they did, most likely not realizing that stop signs were newly erected. After a while, everything seemed to fall into place. Then, drivers became lazy. Many slowed down, but didn’t stop. It morphed into a dangerous intersection once again as the stop signs were totally ignored. I never realized that ignore and ignorance were so closely related.
Stephanie and I had to leave the house again. We walked over to the squad car and let the officer know that we approved of what he was doing, and asked him if he was acting upon a complaint. Smiling, he told us that the complaint was old, but that he had some time to work on the problem. In forty-five minutes, he had handed out nine citations. I noticed that he had gotten two in one stop. He was having fun. He mentioned that while he had one car pulled over another drove past him and right through the stop sign.
While talking to him, a blue car ran the stop sign traveling north and drove right up the street where we were. We waved him bye, he turned on the lights, and followed the car into the driveway across the street. Our neighbor was carpooling with a coworker and the coworker was the culprit driving through the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. It was strange to see a cop car go across the street to nail a violator.
I have no idea what we’ll do for entertainment next week.
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