Like a lot of other people, I believed that there were people underground at all the intersections making the traffic lights change. But for some reason I specifically thought that it was a group of out-of-work pirates.

Tabby

when i was about 5, my mom used to tell me to hiss at red lights so that they would hurry up and change to green and she could go. i kept doing that until i was about 12. she never really discouraged it, so i figured it must work. people thought i had tourettes.

Sylvie

i thought the traffic lights were just christmas lights all year long to make the roads look pretty. i could never figure out why my parents always stopped at them. so, in regards to that, i always through a fit and told my mom to start driving.

courtney

I used to believe that my parents relied on me to make the traffic lights green. I would do this by absorbing the green from trees and grass with my eyes and beam it into the traffic lights. If i was given enough time i had a 100% success rate.

Jeff F

I used to believe that there was a button on the dash board that had to be pushed for the light to change. The problem was that the button was located in a different place for every traffic light. My parents would tell me, when I didn't try to find the button, that the light changed because another child in a different car had found it.

James

Here was how I imagined traffic lights worked:

Pressure-sensitive plates were placed directly beneath the asphalt on all the roads. When too many cars drove over them, indicating that traffic was getting too heavy on a particular road and wildly rushing cars were more likely to crash into each other, the light turned red to stop all the cars and make their drivers calm down. Then the cars on the other road, their drivers nicely calmed down, could proceed until they, too, became disorderly and the pressure plates told the light to change.

I came up with this hypothesis all on my own. When I asked my dad if this was how traffic lights worked, he, trying to keep his focus on the road, just said "Sure, hon." So I believed this for quite some time. ;P

Freezair

i use to beleive that if you rubbed your hands together, got them really hot and pointed at a traffic light, it would turn green.

katrina

I used to believe that traffic lights were controlled by groundhogs (or some similar animal) that had been trained to make the lights change when it felt cars go over the road.

Jamie

while riding with my parents when i was 13 or 14, my father told me that if you are stuck at a red light and it seems to be taking too long all you have to do is 'honk twice and go!'. He said as long as you 'signal your intentions' it wasn't against the law. A year after obtaining my driver's license I drove my father to work and proceeded to 'honk twice and go' through a red-light...my father laughed so hard he couldn't breathe when i told him i'd been 'taking his advice' for a year!

Michelle

When I was little, I used to think that people woke up very early in the morning to be first in line at traffic lights.

Denise H.

When I was very little, I thought you had to obey the traffic light that was over the street you were headed to. So when my mom would turn, I got very upset because she was breaking the law. I thought she would get shot for going through ANY red light, so I didn't like driving around town very much.

Xornia

As a child, I believed that traffic lights were controlled by an elaborate underground operations center (picture, if you will, any NASA footage of `ground control’ during the 70’s). In my mind, this amphitheatre-like operations center was filled with long rows of workstations, at which there were monitors and many blikenligths and buttons. These workstations were staffed by men with slicked-back, salt n’ pepper hair, who held clipboards and wore lab coats and black, thick rimmed glasses. Each traffic signal held a camera and when enough cars had gathered, the man in white coat, responsible for that particular intersection, would change the lights and give the waiting drivers their chance to pass.

Donald

when i was younger i believed that if my mom stayed at a traffic light too long it would shoot laser beams at us
so i always told my mom to hurry up i eventually ended up being grounded

anon

I used to think that if you went through a traffic light while it was red, a large hook (teathered to the light by a chain) would come rushing out of the traffic light, chase your car, crash its hook through the front windshield and drag you back to the red light until it had turned green. Was always very stressed out when my Mom went through a yellow light.

Knox

When I was a child, I used to see the "Don't Walk" light(the one that's in the shape of a hand), and think that if you would move while it was on, it would come out and slap you. So I was very afraid to move and I would tell my parents "Don't move or the hand will slap you!"

Anon

Unlike some of the posts here, I didn't think there were little men or animals operating the traffic lights, I thought the traffic lights were happy when they were green, surprised when they turned yellow and then mad when they were red.

jab

I used to believe that traffic lights were linked by wires to a room at the nearest police station, with lots of switches that could change them from red to amber to green and so on.

I thought they were operated by a really old policeman who was too old to pound the beat any more.

Jeremy

As a child, I was firmly convinced that all the traffic lights in the entire country (Britain) were operated by separate, large teams of people based in subterranean offices.

Each set of traffic lights was fitted with a periscope, like the one on a submarine. The leader of the team would spend most of his time staring up through this at the street, whilst his minions brought him sandwiches, cakes and coffee.

When traffic approached, he would alert his second in command, who immediately bellowed into a desk microphone: "Action stations!"

The rest of the team members would then jump up from their desks and turn a giant handle that changed the colour of the traffic lights.

If the leader was annoyed with the local council for some reason, he would deliberately wind the officials up by creating a massive traffic jam and making everybody late for work that day. If he'd heard about a bank raid on the news, he'd use the jam to help the police capture the robbers.

I used to look forward to being a student when I was older, as I reckoned they helped change the traffic lights during the college holidays - and got paid tons of money for doing it. During quiet periods, you could read the paper, watch the telly, drink mugs of tea and eat biscuits.

The walls of the traffic light changing stations were padded with empty egg boxes, to muffle the sounds of the traffic passing overhead.

Fiona

I thought there was a man in a control room who controlled all the traffic lights in the country...when you pushed the crossing button he saw it and changed the lights.

silverstar1809

We were driving somewhere this morning; Mom, me, and my little sister. I took the opportunity to quiz them about traffic lights.

"What does a red light mean?" I asked.
"Stop," Audrey (3 years old) answered.

"What does a yellow light mean?"
"Go slow."

"What does a green light mean?" I asked.
"GO, DUMB-A**!!" Audrey answered promptly.
I burst out laughing. Needless to say, my mother learned that she needs to watch her language when her younger daughter is in the car!!

Taylor