As we begin a work week following the week of July 4th, I hope all Fishers residents had a safe and enjoyable holiday period.  Now that we are back to the normal grind, I have a very simple but important request to make of people around our fair city that operate motor vehicles.

I have lived in Fishers for 27 years, so I have lived through major growth spurts.  When I moved here in 1991, the previous year’s census figure put the population within the Town of Fishers at about 7,500.  The year 2000 census lists the then-town’s resident count at 37,835, an increase over that ten-year period of almost 404%.   In 2010, the Census Bureau counted 76,794 souls in Fishers.  According to the City of Fishers, the city’s population as of July, 2017 was 91,832.

The bottom line is this….Fishers has been undergoing  steady growth, with some spurts in the local population.  As a result of all this growth, Fishers has done its best to grow the city’s infrastructure to keep up with the massive increase in residents.

One aspect of this is road construction.  Fishers and the surrounding area have often struggled to keep the road and street network up-to-date with the population growth.  So as a long-time citizen of Fishers, I have experienced more than my share of navigating through construction zones and busy detour routes.

Until I retired nearly seven years ago, I commuted, often in the middle of all that construction, to and from downtown Indianapolis.  It was important to constantly remind myself of a virtue I worked hard to instill in my daughters – patience!

It takes longer to get from one place to another when there is construction in place.  Motorists have an important responsibility to observe the lowered speed limits in construction zones and be on the alert for construction workers as they perform their often-dangerous jobs.

I have noticed something this spring and summer I have not seen in Fishers, at least at the scale I am seeing it now.  It appears a number of drivers in our community do not know the purpose of the yellow (some call it amber) traffic signal.  We all know green means we can safely drive through the intersection.  But I am seeing way too many motorists not observing the yellow light, sometime not even observing the red light.

The purpose of the yellow light on a traffic signal is to clear the intersection as the light prepares to turn red.  If you get too aggressive and move into the intersection after the traffic signal shows yellow, there’s a good chance your vehicle will be in the intersection when the signal facing you is red, and that is a clear traffic violation.

Many of us are in a hurry. Maybe we are late for work, late for the kids sports contest or we are just in too much of a rush to get wherever we are going,  I have a message for you…aggressive driving through a traffic-signal controlled intersection can cause you even more delay if there is a collision, and worst case, could injure you and others.

I am not being critical of my neighbors in Fishers.  I am just asking us all to take a deep breath and ask ourselves why so many of us are being so aggressive in our driving habits.

I hate to give you more bad news, but much more road construction is on tap for the next few years, including the rebuild of State Road 37 in Fishers.  Now is the time to think long and hard about how we drive.

I seen many careful and respectful drivers in Fishers, and to all of you I say thank you.  I am not excluding myself in the category of drivers sometimes behaving in a too-aggressive manner.  I am writing this piece to remind myself to do the right thing when behind the wheel.

So, my message to all my fellow Fishers residents is this – before you put the vehicle in drive or hit the clutch on a manual transmission, take a deep breath, and make a promise to yourself you will operate your car in a safe and respectful manner.  I plan to start doing that.  I hope you do too.