YOU'VE got to feel sorry for Ann Reid. Well, you don't have to but I do - if only for a moment in a double-edged columnist's sort of a way.

Ann is the York transport supremo who seems to have made a supremo mistake after agreeing that her daughter should be whisked through the city's traffic lights en route to her wedding. All the lights were turned to green to test a new traffic light system designed to ease the passage of emergency vehicles.

This very enjoyable story has travelled round the world, making the wedding of Hannah Reid and Simon Fraser memorable in ways they probably hadn't expected.

Mind you, given the success of other City of York Council experiments, it's a wonder Hannah and Simon ended up at the same ceremony and didn't instead find themselves accidentally married to complete strangers at opposite ends of the city.

Here's another thing about traffic lights: they always turn to red when I cycle up to them every morning. Do you think the council's new traffic management system, known by the technical acronym GMDTTCOT (get my daughter to the church on time), is sophisticated enough to spot Evening Press journalists on their bikes and change to red in an instant?

Could this explain those mornings when the lights at Monk Bar go through a complete set of changes without once settling on green for cyclists turning right and heading Walmgate-wards? And after this column goes to print, will I be stuck there so long that I become a cobwebbed curiosity, the skeleton bicycle man of Lord Mayor's Walk?

Coun Reid said she regretted agreeing to be part of the experiment and apologised for "the lapse in my usual high standards". This wasn't enough for the easily affronted of York, who set about venting their fury with furrowed brows and biros clasped in rage-clenched fingers (well, I wasn't there when they set to so I don't know for sure, but the mental image is irresistible).

Coun Reid was abused from almost all sides amid a blizzard of words and phrases such as "absolutely disgraceful", "prompt resignation" and "personal abuse of power and gratification".

I liked that last one. Only in this country could fixing the traffic lights for your daughter's wedding be considered such a stern transgression. It's not exactly sex, drugs and pocketfuls of used notes, is it?

I'd say the punishment pretty much fits the crime. Coun Reid agreed to something she shouldn't have done and her punishment entails having the story splashed all over the place, even reaching Australia, South Africa and Ireland. How embarrassing is that?

Oddest of all was Lib Dem council leader Steve Galloway's remarks that it had been "very courageous" of Ann Reid's daughter to agree to use the system on her wedding day. Courageous? Maybe he knows something we don't about how the system works. Perhaps the lights were set to green in all directions and it was a miracle they got through in one piece.

Here are two red lights to be spotted in York:

RED: for anyone who wants their rubbish collected regularly;

RED: for anyone who wants to swim, exercise or attend concerts at the York Barbican Centre.

There has been plenty written about rubbish lately, so I won't add to the pile. As for the Barbican, you can't - go there, that is. The place is forlorn, a once-busy venue and community centre that has become bogged in controversy and various legal quagmires since the Liberal Democrats decided to flog it off.

This is far more disgraceful than Ann Reid twiddling with the traffic lights for her daughter's wedding. A valuable resource for York has been abandoned to argument, indecision and heated tit-for-tatting ever since the Lib Dems came up with their grand plan.

The chances of the revamped Barbican getting a green light seem increasingly remote. That light is stuck permanently on red.

PS: Here's a rumour, whispered from one of my brain cells to another. York's traffic lights now change to green whenever a Smart car approaches.

Updated: 08:57 Thursday, October 20, 2005