Green light. Wait. Here comes a Mercedes SUV, driver engrossed in a cellphone conversation. Then a gray Honda Accord, not a trace of guilt on the driver's face.

A green traffic light that once meant an unambiguous ''go'' has come to mean ''not yet.'' Yellow has as much to do with caution as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has to do with forthrightness. And red, according to a traffic study conducted by two civil engineering professors at the University of Florida, now means that traffic will continue through a stop light for up to four more seconds.

Anyone who fails to acknowledge the new rules -- say some hapless tourist from a faraway place where traffic laws aren't flouted like a high school dress code -- risks inclusion in one of the 9,000 crashes a year that Florida attributes to red-light runners. In 2005, those wrecks killed 96 and injured 6,300.

Professors Kenneth Courage and Scott Washburn drew the same conclusion from their findings that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reached in its own study of the red-light-runner phenomenon last year. Automatic cameras that snap photos and levy instant fines -- now used by more than 250 cities across the nation -- make a marked difference. Suddenly, drivers understand that red means stop.

South Florida drivers, trapped in a perpetual rush hour, validate the old rats-in-a-box theory of uncivil behavior at every major intersection. The city of Orlando last year counted 11,000 drivers a day busting through five of the city's major intersections.

But anyone who braves South Dixie Highway in Miami or Pines Boulevard in Pembroke Pines or Federal Highway anywhere in South Florida knows that Orlando drivers, by comparison, are as meek as Mouseketeers.

Red-light cameras could bring sanity to our streets. Hallandale Beach, Aventura, Pembroke Pines and Doral, among other Florida towns, want to install the cameras and enjoy the 89 percent drop in red-light runners that Melbourne recorded in a 2006 experiment. But rather than collect fines as violations of city codes, they're waiting for the Legislature to explicitly legalize traffic camera systems.

It won't happen. Not this year. The chairman of the Florida Senate Transportation Committee, Carey Baker, from Eustis, a town excited just to have traffic signals, single-handedly snuffed the bill last week. Baker and other opponents think of traffic cameras as big-brother intrusions on personal privacy, though no one seems to object to cameras at toll-road booths.

They argue that cities were really embracing cameras to generate revenue (as opposed to the Florida Turnpike Commission?). Considering the massive cut the Legislature seems poised to deliver to city property-tax collections, a new revenue source that saves lives and reduces injuries while raising extra money sounds downright brilliant.

Let red-light runners make up the budget deficits. Our stunning overabundance of lunatic drivers could come to be seen as precious natural resources.

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