Of all the jerkwater traffic traps set to
catch and fleece U.S. motorists, the most wondrously efficient was a
fast-flicking traffic light in southeast Georgia's tiny
Ludowici.* The Ludowici light, which has brought the American
Automobile Association more complaints than any other light in the
U.S., hangs astride the intersection of two heavily traveled highways:
State 38 to Savannah and a combined U.S. 25 and U.S. 301, which funnels
thousands of vacationers from the East and Midwest toward Florida. For
traffic on U.S. 25-301 , the light has been
known to flick from red to green and hold for only 16 seconds—just
long enough to let three left-turning cars through, and get the
piled-up traffic rolling. Then its timer snaps through a
quick-as-the-eye amber warning to a red stop.Unless he slams on his brakes and risks a pile-up from behind, the
fourth driver in the left-turn line—and sometimes the fifth and
sixth—rolls through the red toward a waiting menace of another color:
one of the two blue Chevrolets manned by the town's three-man police
force, whose chief occupation is to collect a $15 “bond” from each
driver not willing to stick around town to be tried and fined $15 for
running a light.The magic lamp went up in 1947, one of the first official achievements
of jovial Mayor J. W. Godfrey, gas-station operator
hand-picked and backed in five re-elections by the local political
boss, spectacled Ralph Dawson, who doubles as city attorney. Mayor
Godfrey drawls that the light, “being a machine, might vary four to
five seconds in wet weather,” admits that rain comes often enough for
the light to produce a quarter or more of the town's $12,000 to $15,000
annual budget. But local members of the Good Government League,
organized by polio-crippled Mail Carrier Harry Chapman to fight the
“Dawson crowd” and its red light, consider Godfrey's figures overly
modest. They once counted 30 arrests in a single day, estimated the
light's take at something upwards of $50,000 a year, got brushed aside
when they demanded a look at town books on public revenue and outlays.Last week agents of the American Automobile Association and the Georgia
State Department of Commerce sat down for still another in a long
procession of meetings with Mayor Godfrey and Boss Dawson at the Long
County courthouse, laid out the motorists' grievances about the speed
trap, and warned that traffic might just bypass Ludowici entirely if
things did not change. In the midst of the proceedings, Good Government
Leaguer Chapman got in a fist fight with Dawson, touched off an uproar
that a pistol-packing state trooper had to break up. But when things
had quieted down, the meeting brought unexpected results. Mayor
Godfrey, Dawson & Co. agreed to traffic studies by the Georgia Highway
Department, agreed as well to follow the department's recommendations
about correct behavior for the Ludowici light.Motorists would be the first to know.*Changed from the Southern-style, Anglo-Saxon name of
Johnson's Station in honor of German Immigrant Karl Ludowici, 19th
century roofing-tile manufacturer, who gave $1,000 toward a new school
building.
