This, there can be no doubt, is an opinion column.

I dream of a town.

It doesn’t have to be a big town. It doesn’t have to be a shiny town, full of cheerleaders that hype all the lists that declare it THE BEST. I dream of a town that doesn’t require the finest dining or a water feature or major league sports. I don’t even need working mass transit. Or buildings that touch the clouds.

I don’t ask for it. I simply dream of a town with traffic lights that work.

They turn green. They turn red. Like they have since a Black man named Garret Augustus Morgan got the patent in the Roaring Twenties.

They turn green. They turn yellow. Then they turn red. Like they have since the world decided in the 1930s that the three-color system was the best way to get people moving.

Green, yellow, red. Synchronized, in my town, like they used to be. Like they’ve been everywhere since Houston synched 102 years ago.

I dream of this city because I damn sure don’t live in it. I live in a place where traffic lights are designed like Czech hedgehogs from war zones, like steel barriers to stop advancing tanks. Or SUVs.

These traffic lights are metaphors for my city itself. Every time you begin to make progress you are told to slow down. To stop. To wait.

In my darkest moments I sit alone at red lights, waiting on nobody at all to cross before me. Waiting. Waiting. I think to myself “OF COURSE PEOPLE GET SHOT EVERYDAY” in my town. We have epidemic Post Road Rage Stress Syndrome from all that stopping and waiting and starting and braking. And breaking.

I know it’s an unseemly thought, that I will rightly be accused of false equivalencies and shoddy logic and insensitivity for saying it out loud. But the red light devil makes me irrational.

I don’t really believe the stop-and-go traffic in my downtown causes shootings. A proliferation of guns and buffoonery does that. But it makes as much sense as anything. Because every time I drive five blocks I WANT TO SHOOT SOMEONE, though I really don’t ever want to shoot anyone at all.

But the real truth is that no one ever drives five blocks in my downtown. They drive one block. And stop at a light that just turned red.

And then they drive another block. And stop at a red light.

And another block. And stop.

And another block.

And stop.

And surely they can’t remember what happens next, because all they can see is red.

Somebody ran a red light in my downtown just yesterday. I honked and readied my middle finger for action. But I holstered it. He’d been through the gantlet, too. I somehow understood.

So I’m left to dream of a town where traffic engineers let people drive safely and economically and continuously, where the computing power of the globe helps make traffic as simple and sensible as when engineers managed it all with slide rules, when people flooded downtown and they got to work on time.

I dream of a day where a Sunday drive downtown, in a verdant valley filled with good food and important history and the fourth highest hypertension rate in America, is not itself a precursor to stroke.

I’ll gladly overlook potholes that could eat a man and stop signs that serve as mere suggestions, if only my street signals might be designed for order, and not as The Caller in a Squid Game version of the children’s classic Red Light/Green Light.

My wife tells me I get too worked up over traffic lights. People I’m late to meet because of red lights tell me to breathe. My children tell me to just stop.

And the lights. Well, they tell me to STOP and go and stop. And go and STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP it. And I go. Crazy.

John Archibald lives in Birmingham, where stop-and-go traffic has an all-new meaning.