This is an opinion column.

“It feels good to be back.”

Oh, if traffic lights could talk.

I don’t normally talk to them. Okay, that’s a lie. I sometimes yell at particularly recalcitrant lights, though they always ignore me.

Traffic lights, of course, can’t talk back. (Though they do mock you.) Oh, if they could.

I’ve certainly never interviewed one—see above. But I had to talk to this one, the one hanging and swaying comfortably and confidently now above the intersection of Airport and Tarrant Huffman roads in bucolic Brownsville Heights on Birmingham’s east side. I had to know how it felt to be back. To be restored after being ambered—essentially, for a traffic light, neutered—a good while back by the transportation nerds who deemed it unworthy.

Deemed a full red, yellow, and green presence wasn’t warranted. Not at the quiet, wooded, intersection of Airport and Tarrant Huffman roads.

“I get it,” the light whispered. I was standing beneath it just before dusk one brisk recent afternoon. “There was traffic, some of it hauling a–, I mean coming pretty hard over the hill down T.H. It’s been repaved, you know. Yeah, it was pretty lonely out here back then. Too lonely, too slow to stop traffic, I guess. Nobody asked me, though. It turned out to be a bad call. I was missed.”

Missed by folks living in Brownsville Heights and its neighboring neighborhoods—Penfield Park, Pine Knoll Vista, Brummitt Heights, Airport Highlands, Zion City, and Maple Grove.

By folks living in areas sometimes easily overlooked when it comes to amenities—no, necessities—like traffic lights. Necessities most of us, me included, typically take for granted, ignore, or occasionally yell at. Because we can.

Remember the closure and replacement of a section of I-20 downtown a few years ago? Because of it, traffic was re-routed every which way, including down Airport and Tarrant Huffman roads and onto their often-unfamiliar surrounding streets, unfamiliar streets if you don’t live there.

GPS took them wherever it was in the mood, guiding cars and heavy-lead hauling 18-wheelers along those roads with no call to be cautious—and, at Airport and Tarrant Huffman, nothing to stall or slow them.

Nothing but blinking amber. Neutered.

Little wonder the intersection became egregiously dangerous for the folks in and around Brownsville Heights. Cars and trucks barreling along Airport and Tarrant Huffman like banshees, sometimes at 50 to 70 miles per hour (35 mph is the posted limit), the light snitched.

Trucks sometimes using the left-turn lane as a passing lane.

Sometimes so dangerously that neighborhood drivers and road-crossing residents often had to scurry.

Sometimes, they weren’t fast enough.

“Those trucks and cars scared me sometimes,” the light whispered. (It only spoke, by the way, when sitting steady on red or green; never on yellow when we all think, Hell yeah, I can make it.)

One day last May Victoria Bell and her car lost an encounter with a speeder at the light. Fittingly, when the traffic light was restored late last year, Bell flipped the switch.

“Felt good,” said the light.

The revival did not happen easily, or quickly. But it happened.

As Birmingham continues to evolve, ascend, and restore once vibrant sites to a new luster, our city, county, and state public officials must remain mindful and responsive to residents in areas too long overlooked or ignored.

From Birmingham to the Black Belt, they must tend to residents appreciative even of a traffic light. Of safe roads. Of a park. Of functioning streetlights. Of sidewalks. Of the sorts of necessities many of us take for granted or ignore. Tend to them as much as the developer dealmakers lingering at their door,

Tend to them, respect them, as was Cynthia Nobles and her neighbors. She lives just a few blocks away from the intersection of Airport and Huffman Tarrant and is president of the Airport Hills community association.

“It was just really a mess,” she told me. “The upgrade to Tarrant Huffman was great, but it created problems for the rest of us. I’ve been here 26 years and in the beginning, 18-wheelers didn’t pass my house. Now, it’s a constant.”

A truck once barreled into a ditch near the intersection, blocking some residents from leaving their homes.

“Neighbors said they’ve almost been run off the road,” Nobles continued. “Victoria is my neighbor’s daughter. She got hit on a Thursday and there was another wreck there on Tuesday. The number of accidents was increasing because of the speeding. The way the hills are made, you can look and not see the vehicles coming, start across then they’re on you before you know it.”

Nobles was on it almost before her then-newly elected City Councilor, J.T. Moore, knew his way around City Hall. “All of this was new to me,” he says of the intersection and its hazards—and of how to fix it.

“A call about a traffic light? I thought, ‘Okay, cool,’” he recalls. “I’ll just call the mayor or whoever we need to talk to, and we’ll just get a light. I shouldn’t be that hard. All you gotta do is flip a switch inside a power box and we’re good to go. It wasn’t that simple.”

Which is why such seemingly small matters can so easily be ignored.

But they can’t. Not any longer. Not while cranes are sprouting throughout downtown core like pesky weeds. Not when millions will be spent to construct an amphitheater and restore the grounds where Carraway Hospital once proudly stood.

It was more than two years before Bell could finally flip the switch. Before the traffic light was restored. Two years of infrastructure and software upgrades, and countless correspondences between departments and financial allocations—which aren’t always levied for all.

Which now must continue to be.

“It felt good,” the light said. “Good to be back.”

Especially good for the residents in and nearby Brownsville Heights. Residents, and those like them throughout our state, who must no longer be taken for granted or ignored.

I’m a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj