Hourglass traffic light design

zyodei

They have something similar in India. By the count of eight, everyone drops out of neutral. By the five, everyone starts revving their engines. By 3, *boom* they’re off like a pack of horses at the Kentucky Derby!

TenInchesTaller

Doesn’t work for colorblind people, so it’s a complete failure.

Jellybit

It’s a cute complete failure though.

hijukal

To those saying countdowns don’t work, I say: check out the countries that already use them. The countdown appears under the traditional traffic lights and counts down both green and red lights.

If it’s red, you know how long you’ve got to sit around wondering about tonight’s dinner. If it’s green, you know if you should even bother trying to make that green light.

I’ve seen it in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and China (I think I’ve seen it in the last two; first three for sure) and it works just fine there.

Ted8305

See how long to wait or be hurry for everyone! What make it great for colorblind people?

misadventures213

The countdown timers that most pedestrian signals have now give me pretty much the same information. Now if we could just get the setup that the Europeans have where the brief red + yellow combo indicates an imminent green, we’d be set.

Ted8305

You can usually estimate when the light will change by watching the cross traffic’s light. Despite that, I think trying to get the jump on traffic lights is a bad idea. It’s traffic, not a drag strip.

Instead, how about lights that stay red if the cross traffic runs their red? Too many people see a green light and assume it’s safe to proceed, only to get t-boned by somebody running a red light.
Anonymous

Agreeing. Most traffic lights in my area have a countdown that displpays for the pedestrians, which you can watch if you’re concerned about such things, both for when you’re wondering when it’s going to go green, and when it’s going to go red. Very nice feature, although it’s a little problematic in that it causes old folks to slow down prematurely, and young folks to speed up to beat the light change.

pentomino

I can’t shake the idea that this is fake, some anonymous prankster trying to drum up threads talking about how everyone will get killed if this gets implemented. The two indistinguishable yellows is a dead giveaway.

The first time I saw these lights was a rage comic on reddit.com.

arp

Well…… you could stack all three maybe horizontally and hope to retrain people to expect lights to be sideways. That would work for the colorblind as well.

cinemajay

THIS!

Brainspore

Agree with both TenInchesTaller and Jellybit, cute design but fails the real-world usability test. If you want to put a countdown number in there you could just have it appear in the same space that the yellow light occupies now.

shanks

Love it. As a very aggressive driver, anything to help me drive more frenzied, to work more info into my moving car art, the better. The last drop of sand hits, and I’m flooring it.

andigopow

God, yes. This! It’s like those racing track lights that count down from the top to bottom. I’d be jamming on the gas half a second after the second to last light turns on.

Anonymous

Not for use in my city. With the yellow light 3,2,1 countdown everybody will start moving on yellowÂ´s 1 but green. :(

Anonymous

It doesn’t differentiate between yellow preceding green and yellow preceding red. Moreover, the indicators changing size and shape is bad. It’s mixing up so many symbolic elements in such a haphazard way that it just becomes absurd!

Chip

On top of all of the other comments… the green light looks like a martini glass, wonderful drinking & driving message–don’t you think?

Myrtonos

“You are indeed opposed to accommodating people with visual disabilities – unless you’re claiming color-blind drivers aren’t even people?”

Would claim that blind people are even people just because they anre’t permitted to drive? You think that because someone is opposed to accomodating drivers with visual disablilities munt mean they are opposed other people with visual defficets, I have said I am not opposed to accomodaitng pedestrains, or visually impared public trasport users, but drivers is a different matter.

“Historically the color-blind have been accommodated; that’s why stop signs are hexagonal, yield signs are triangular, and traffic lights are always stacked up in the same sequence.”

Are you saying refusing to grant someone a drivers license is not granting them full citizenship, even if they are not disadvataged without a car. I’m not sure that color defficint people have been conciously accomodated. Traffic lights are not always stacked in the same order, some juristictions have horizontal and some vertical traffic lights. From when traffic lights were introduced until the introduction of LEDs, each aspect required a different colour filter, and so it wasn’t feasible to have differet aspects in the same position, it was also desirable for the red to be visible as far back as possible. Not all juristictions grant driver’s licenses to individuals with more pronounced forms of colour defficiencies (such as red-green), and many more do not grant them commercial licenses.

“Since color blindness is highly heritable and extremely common (some estimates as high as 99% of males with measurable levels of color blindness, and at least 5% of males have severe color blindness), preventing color blind people from driving would push entire families into poverty almost instantly.”

It depends on what forms you are talking about, the mild forms would not be relevant in this particular case, as they can always distinguish between the colors red, yellow, green and blue. Red-green and blue-yellow color blindness are the more prounounced forms and the former is the one that is a disadavatage in this case.

An Analogy: In New Zealand, where they drive on the same side as the UK and Australia, they have an intersection rule where those turing right still give way to straight ahead traffic, but the scenario of opposing traffic turning into the same side street places priority to those turning right, more information on this website. This means that those turning right need to detirmine whether someone coming towards them is going straight or turning left. It also means that when there are two cars in a row coming towards the right turning vehicle, and one is going straight or turing left, the right turing driver needs to discern whether the left turing vehicle is ahead of the staight ahead vehicle or the other way round, a difficulty for dyslexic people*. On top of that, the left turing drivers sometimes needs to check in three different directions within seconds of each other, a difficulty for people whose vision is not correctable to 20/20, or if they have tunnel vision.

*If you look at the list of famous color defficint people and famous dyslexics, there is cosiderable overlap.

Anonymous

Myrtonos, you need to look stuff up before you post.

Colorblind drivers have historically been accommodated, on purpose, whenever possible – because to do otherwise without good reason would be bigoted and morally wrong. If you wish to posit a correlation between colorblindness and driving skill you should look up the existing data instead of completely making shit up based on your sublime lack of empathy for your fellow human beings. You have absolutely nothing to support your idea that color blind citizens who currently hold licenses are bad drivers, because as it turns out, it’s not true.

You know who the bad drivers are? People under the age of 30, unmarried people, and people over 55. And, more than all other indicators – males. Men are shitty drivers compared to women when you look at actual data – three times more likely to kill an innocent bystander, twice as likely to get a traffic ticket, etc. etc. etc.

Let’s disenfranchise unmarried males, how’s that sound? It would do far more good than adding to the existing burdens of the tens of thousands of people you seem more than ready to screw over based on absolutely zero research.

(Edited by Beschizza to remove insults.)
- Myrtonos
  
  I have done more reading than you might think.
  
  “Colorblind drivers have historically been accommodated, on purpose, whenever possible – because to do otherwise without good reason would be bigoted and morally wrong.”
  
  How do you know it’s intentional? My reading suggests otherwise. If it were intentional, it could be that there are just too many of them to exclude them from driving.
  
  “If you wish to posit a correlation between colorblindness and driving skill you should look up the existing data instead of… You have absolutely nothing to support your idea that color blind citizens who currently hold licenses are bad drivers, because as it turns out, it’s not true.”
  
  But consider this.
  
  “You know who the bad drivers are? People under the age of 30, unmarried people, and people over 55. And, more than all other indicators – males. Men are shitty drivers compared to women when you look at actual data – three times more likely to kill an innocent bystander, twice as likely to get a traffic ticket, etc. etc. etc.”
  
  To be specific, women are on average safer drivers, and guess what, color defficiency (specifically the red green type) is more common in men than in women and how do you knom there isn’t a connection. There could be many reasons why womean are on average safer dirvers and how do you know color defficency isn’t one of them.
  
  “Let’s disenfranchise unmarried males, how’s that sound? It would do far more good than adding to the existing burdens of the tens of thousands of people you seem more than ready to screw over based on absolutely zero research.”
  
  While quite a significant number of people might have it, I suspect the number of them as a total portion of road users is much lower, for various reasons.

james4765

For people who are saying the countdowns would make people take off like they’re on a dragstrip – take it from a former street racer, you don’t need a countdown for that. You can watch the light pattern from the cross street / left turn lane pretty easily.

The light turning yellow is the indicator you need to get ready for a launch.

It would be helpful for people who might have to deal with kids / grab a drink of soda. “I’ve only got 5 seconds, should I play with the radio?” I want these things so bad…

Kosmoid

I love it when people call their own design “sensible.”

What a design fallacy: throw in a conceptual graphic, add more information, assume people will want to learn how to read the new signal, and don’t address the real problem (people don’t look at the signal to begin with).

This rewards the people who are anxious to slam on the gas as soon as the green appears. Meanwhile, the person sitting in front of them is thinking about what to have for supper.

If you don’t have the inclination to watch the traffic light, you shouldn’t be driving. Mark, you’re failing me on this one.

Anonymous

Cute, but would get a lot of people killed. As Shanks pointed out, you’d have people flooring it as soon as they saw the animation for the last few grains of sand.

NatalieSharp

Hey has anyone mentioned how it wouldn’t work with colorblind people? Yes? Oh… Well it wouldn’t…

Jack Daniel

Better to just add a countdown to the current design. When it’s green: a countdown inside the green, when yellow: a countdown inside the yellow, etc.

Moriarty

I don’t think a countdown inside is a good idea. The strength of the current design is its simplicity and high visibility for fast processing.

Maybe a single countdown next to the light, for green/yellow and then red, but I’m not sure a countdown is a good idea in the first place, as it will probably just make people speed toward intersections more, which is just unsafe.

Antinous / Moderator

Where the hell is Ravenclaw?

Moriarty

“Interactive?”

Jake0748

“Interactive”?

That’s what I was thinking too. :)

Anonymous

I think the yellow light must appear only when going from green to red, and NOT from red to green. Not only is safer, it assign only one meaning to the yellow light: “STOP if you can”.

Anonymous

This design makes the assumption that the traffic light cycle is *always* determined by timing, instead of by events. Any number of traffic light systems are event-driven, rather than strict time-driven, and these lights will immediately fail to work properly in those conditions. It will render them about the same usefulness as the ‘progress bar’ so hideously endemic to async computer software tasks.

SSSasky

I agree with most of the posters. Terrible design.

My first thought was that it won’t work for colourblind people. Second thought: we shouldn’t be encouraging people to jump the light any more than they already do.

Third thought: from a design perspective, a complex LED-based display that requires a flow chart to explain how to read it is a huge failure compared to three coloured circles that are nearly universally understood, and fairly intuitive (and address the previous two concerns).

Fail.

Joe Funk

Definitely gotta get rid of the “Ready” stage. You do not want a yellow light after the red, before the green. Yellow needs to mean “getting ready to be red”, not “changing states”.

And really, giving people a countdown to the green light is just not a good idea. People will always be “pushing the yellow” and rushing through intersections just as the light is changing to red. Every time someone jumps out into the intersection the instant the light turns green (or even jumps the gun a little because of anticipation), that’s one more chance for a t-bone.

Anonymous

Terrible visibility. Think of east/west roads during sunrise/sunset. Think of rain or snow storms. Splitting the amount of lighted area up is a bad idea – you want more light, not less. Think of areas where intersections are on hills or curves (not every city is flat like Oklahoma).

It would work for color blind people the same way current lights do now. You learn where the lights are and wht order they are in. Not all cities or US states use vertically oriented stoplights, many have horizontally oriented lights.

The best way to increase safety at intersections is a combination of longer yellow lights and a 1 second period of time where all directions are red at each directional signal change.

And lastly, giving people more reason to gun it and try to beat the light is a terrible idea, especially at intersections with lots of pedestrian activity.

snakedart

Holding out for a spinning beach ball.

Birko

Very good! I see far too much of the beachball during the day.

fc

On the other hand, adding a countdown to the pedestrian crossing would be a very good idea: while few sane drivers run a red light because they don’t want to wait, many walk across when it’s red when they see no car approaching. If they saw that the cars would get red in 8secs anyway, they would avoid unnecessary risk.

Anonymous

You get countdowns on pedestrian crossings a lot in Europe.

moniker42

This is a great idea but it only of a psychological appeasment. You still wait the same amount of time.

Rob Cockerham

I agree with a yellow-light countdown. Not all yellow lights are the same duration, and knowing when the yellow is going to changes is really important information. And rather than have to sync them all, having a yellow countdown-to-red would work well. And while we are at it, can we put tenths-of-a-second on there too?

Anonymous

A countdown timer wouldn’t work for all the places that like to short their light’s yellow times to catch more people running a red. Can’t make as much money being honest.

duskcheetah

Many of the traffic lights that I see nowadays use those pressure-sensor things to determine whether or not there is someone waiting in a particular lane, and thus whether to give that lane a green light. The amount of time to wait for a green light is nondeterministic – I don’t really see how the design could handle that.

Interesting idea, but not very practical. I’m okay with bad ideas in the idea stage. Bad ideas often beget good ideas.

dragonfrog

Yeah, those are the lights that even normally prudent and law-abiding cyclists run…
Marja

Also, the weight sensors make the intersections unbikeable.
- soap
  
  I have not seen a weight sensor used as a signal sensor anywhere in the USA. You two are most likely referring to inductive loops:
  http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regulatory-devices/question234.htm
  which are perfectly capable of not only detecting bicycles, but differentiating them from automobiles.
  
  The open question is whether or not your municipality is electing to use collect/use that information, or if (as is much much more common) the detector is set conservatively and only triggers the second of two light patterns.
  - Marja
    
    Sorry. I wanted to rely earlier, but the comment wouldn’t go through. I know that at one point, at a fairly busy intersection, the left-turn lights depend on some mechanism that bikes can’t trigger. I ended up waiting through two or three cycles of the other traffic lights, without one cycle of the left-turn light. Eventually traffic cleared long enough to get through, but the lights should work for everyone.
- bcsizemo
  
  That they do.
  
  And I’ve seen motorcycles have to go through red lights because of that issue.
  
  But I’ve seen many of cyclist run the red light, while in my car.
  And while not waiting for the green to be tripped by the line of cars sitting at the light right next to them.
  
  Double standard is when you complain about not sharing the road, and then don’t follow the rules of it….it’s one or the other.
- flatfive
  
  Those aren’t weight sensors. They’re induction loops, and speaking generally, they’re often not sensitive enough to pick up the presence of a small motorcycle.

Rob Cockerham

Oh, and I wouldn’t mind some kind of heads-up that the light was close to turning green again. I hate to have to rush the end of my sexts.

Unmutual

How about a single orb that slowly changes hue through the entire color spectrum? Of course these would not be discreet color changes but rather a continually shift through a gradiation of millions of colors. I mean come on its the 21st century we have the technology.

Anonymous

The countdown is a failure for people who can’t count.

Baldhead

I think “interactive” is one of those words that get used mainly by people who don’t know what they mean. “Multimedia” is another. I love how people think “multimedia speakers” are even possible.

Anonymous

@Joe Funk: Traffic lights in Europe (and elsewhere?) display yellow before the green, as well as after.

hdon

“You still wait the same amount of time.”

Anonymous

yeah but what about color-blind people?
The three light system works for them.

Mitch

It’s cute, but I like the conventional lights that allow you to use both the position and color of the light as cues. The traffic lights in Israel gave a little more information. They had either a flashing green or green plus yellow combination to show that it was about to turn yellow and a red plus yellow combination that said “Wake up, you’re about to have a green light.”

More information about how much time is left for both the red and the green lights would be helpful for everyone. Waiting is more tolerable when you know how much longer you have to wait.
On a bicycle it’s helpful to know how much red light time is left so that you can slow down and arrive at the intersection when the light turns green to avoid having to lose momentum and accelerate being completely stopped. It’s also helpful to know how much green light time is left to know whether it’s worth accelerating to make the light or better to downshift and prepare to stop.

TenInchesTaller

But really, this is a terrible traffic light design. Not only does it not even not meet the main requirement of a traffic light (everyone who can legally drive can use it effectively), it actively encourages people to act like driving is a race by making traffic lights into starting flags.

Anonymous

No countdown. Seriously. You’ll have impatient driver A gunning it the split-second it hits green, while in-a-hurry driver B races to beat the red light in the cross-traffic… guaranteed increase in intersection collisions (probably fatal when driver B crushes driver A’s door in).

FAIL.

rrh

This design is a little more sensible:
http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/11/30/a-better-understanding-of-stoplights/

It doesn’t throw out the familiarity of the current light design, just adds to it, and retains the value to colourblind drivers. “Circular thing moving in clockwise direction” is easily as accepted a trope for time as the hourglass.

semiotix

Traffic lights work fantastically well already.

Anonymous

Terrible design.

Completely ignores existing iconography like octagons and arrows.

Differentiation relies on perfect color vision and optimal viewing conditions.

And heightening the sense that I’m *waiting* for the light? Thanks. That will calm me down and make the drive so much more enjoyable.

Teller

Others can comment on the design. I think they need a new translator.

Myrtonos

“You’re opposed to accommodating people with visual disabilities. There’s not a whole lot to get.”

No, I am not opposed to accomadating pedestrians with visual disabilities, but the importance of vision in operating a vehicle means that any visual disability can been safely seen as a disadvantage, especially if they are carrying passengers.
Say there are two licensees in the same vehicle, one is color defficent and the other is not and also has no other visual disablilty, does that give you an idea of who is better of controlling the vehicle?

Ito Kagehisa

You are indeed opposed to accommodating people with visual disabilities – unless you’re claiming color-blind drivers aren’t even people?

Historically the color-blind have been accommodated; that’s why stop signs are hexagonal, yield signs are triangular, and traffic lights are always stacked up in the same sequence. They have been permitted full citizenship, unlike blind and deaf people who unfortunately must be discriminated against at this time. Since color blindness is highly heritable and extremely common (some estimates as high as 99% of males with measurable levels of color blindness, and at least 5% of males have severe color blindness), preventing color blind people from driving would push entire families into poverty almost instantly.

You have proposed disenfranchising millions of people who currently are full participants, and you don’t seem to understand how callous and bigoted your proposal is. You need to re-think your base premises and be careful of such sweeping generalities; or you might find that the person being denied access to some privilege is YOU.

Curt

Yes, but are you willing to pay more taxes to pay for this?

Anonymous

I think it’s a dumb design for a number of reasons – but having a countdown will simply encourage impatient drivers/boy-racers to do racing starts (which is the last thing these people need).

Curt

Really we need less traffic lights and more roundabouts.

Also a PSA on how to properly use them.

Church

“Also a PSA on how to properly use them.”

Yeah. That’s sort of the problem, innit?

The Life Of Bryan

Since so many people drive as if theyâ€™re on their way to or from a bar, I think giving people visual cues as to their Estimated Martini Time is a wonderful idea.

Michael Zed

How do I bring up the preferences dialog?

daneyul

With all the concern about color blindness round here, Boing Boing should maybe give some mention to one of the most interesting, unexpected, and hopeful, science-med stories of the last year (and, uh, 2 months)?

http://www.gizmag.com/scientists-cure-color-blindness-in-monkeys/12881/

Anonymous

I’m not a fan. Interpretation-requiring events or signals are distractions from the hazards of normal driving; signals should be clear, concise, and singular so that knowledge of new hazards is imparted automatically rather than requiring attention.

kpkpkp

In NYC, the captions would read:

For Action
—– ———-
Red Honk
Yellow Go
Green Double Park

Antinous / Moderator

I get it perfectly. You’re opposed to accommodating people with visual disabilities. There’s not a whole lot to get.

Ito Kagehisa

Well, Antinous, that’s certainly the mainstream of design on the World Wide Web. I sometimes have to lie most outrageously in order to prevent web designers from completely refusing to accomodate the blind and color-blind in scientific web applications. If you can’t use it with elinks, the blind can’t use it (BB is pretty good in this regard, kudos to the webmaster).

As for this traffic light, I think what it needs is the soundtrack from Mario Kart, with a nice BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEEEEEEEEP for the hyperventilating drivers anxiously waiting to floor their accelerators as soon the last red pixels wink out…

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race

On that note I think I will drive home now.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  It’s appalling. And 8% is also a really significant chunk of people.

Niklas

A quick calculation shows that this traffic light would cause the driver to spend approximately four times as long time looking at the traffic light. Rather than spending 0.3 seconds looking at the light the average person will spend more than one second looking at the light because the extra complexity.

As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, this might also fuel road rage (I have no direct knowledge of this though).

Color blindness is a real problem with this design.

Where I live we have variable time for our traffic lights (magnets under the tarmac sense approaching cars) that can calculate which lanes to stop and which to give green light. This design does not encompass this.

To make intersections more safe we need to work more on the intersections rather than the abstraction on the rules governing the intersection. This should be a no-brainer.

Marja

“(magnets under the tarmac sense approaching cars)”

Another common method which forces bikes off the road.

bob d

Yeah, it’s a bad idea for all the reasons people have pointed out (the color-blind issue, encouraging a drag-race mentality that would increase collisions, non-deterministic light-timing), but I’d like to add another reason. Often, when there’s too much light shining on the face of the traffic light, you can only tell what the light is because one of the three is slightly more luminous. Color and detail are lost in that case; if the traffic light relied on color or complex shapes to get its message across, even people who aren’t colorblind wouldn’t be able to tell what it was.
Also: a designer who isn’t even considering the colorblind (which is almost 10% of the male population) is really missing something important.

SamSam

Another problem that no one’s mentioned so far… the count-down aspect doesn’t actually work. It’s significantly worse then a numerical count-down.

Unless every light in the city takes exactly the same amount of time, then these hour glasses will have to empty at different rates. So seeing that the hour glass is half-empty tells you nothing at all if you don’t know the rate that it’s emptying at. To know how much time you have left, you must 1) see the amount remaining, 2) watch it for long enough to get a good sense of how quickly it’s emptying, and 3) make a estimation of how much longer you have.

Even if you could estimate the rate that it’s emptying, which you can’t while your driving safely, your estimate of how much longer you have is likely to be faulty. Humans are bad at estimating areas of unequal shapes, and the “sand” falls out much faster in the last few seconds than the earlier seconds because of the cone at the bottom.

Cute, but terribly thought out.

awjtawjt

exactery, @Joe Funk. Why nobody else pick up on this? In the US we have green-yellow-red, not red-yellow-green.

Myrtonos

“Also: a designer who isn’t even considering the colorblind (which is almost 10% of the male population) is really missing something important.”

The very first comment claimed that it would be a complete failure because it wouldn’t work for the colorblind. But it would work for the vast majority of road users, so I wouldn’t be a complete failure. Something like 8% of the male population are color defficient. Most cars on the road can carry four or five people, and not everyone is disadavtaged without a car.

Antinous / Moderator

Yeah, let’s get rid of wheelchair ramps, too. The cripples can just beg one of their friends to carry them, right? Right?
- Myrtonos
  
  You don’t get it, we are talking about the drivers, not pedestrians. I would reject a pestrian signal that didn’t work for color deficint people.
  But driving requries a license and most cars can carry four or five people. What I am asying is that as long as the color defficint have some other alternative the self-driving, this design issue shoud not matter as much as if their mobility is more affected by not being able to drive.

RyanMcFitz

Pretty, but one more reason the design fails: some of us live where it snows. http://aol.it/4WoO8f

rrh

I live where it snows. It’s snowing right now. We have L.E.D. streetlights. The last time I’ve seen one get obscured by snow was in the late 90s, when it would have been the older bulbs.

That’s one police officer talking out of his ass and a bunch of people snoping it because it gives them a chance to act smug.

Anonymous

My cheap redesign would be a yellow line before the light. The yellow line would mark the distance from the intersection that a car can travel at the speed limit during the yellow light. So if you haven’t crossed the yellow line when it turns yellow you can’t make the light. If you’re over the yellow line when the light turns cruise on through.

Anonymous

we already have a way of knowing when it’s about to change back to green. you look at the light or walk sign of the perpendicular street…

also, how do colorblind people read traffic lights?

Niklas

“also, how do colorblind people read traffic lights?”
Spatial memory is pretty well developed in humans and color blind people does not tend to over-represented among people who have trouble with spatial locations.

@Marja wrote “Another common method which forces bikes off the road.”
Or, you could do like they do here: Have the magnets respond to bikes and be generous with the bike paths.

shadowfirebird

Forgive my ignorance (and my lateness into this conversation) but do all the traffic lights in the US work on timers alone?

Here in the UK we have sensors that tell the lights when a road has a queue or not. A timer is involved, but the lights don’t spend the same amount of time on red every time. So the countdown would likely be as accurate as, say, a “time remaining” dialogue in Windows — that is to say, not very.

xzzy

A much cooler way to revolutionize traffic lights is integrate them into our cars with wireless communication.

Approach an intersection, car gets told what the state of the intersection is, how much time before the next change, and my HUD refreshes with relevant information. Leave the old traffic lights up for backwards compatibility or as a failsafe.

Since it’s pretty much inevitable that cars are going to be driving themselves at some point, getting a wireless stop lights in place would make that change a little bit smoother.

Not to mention the data mining that could go on. Optimizing routes and light patterns would get a whole lot more nerdy.

foobar

I’m not sure that’s a very good idea so long as we allow Microsoft to develop dashboard software.

Art Carnage

That’s a great idea, because we use hourglasses so often in our daily lives. You know, like when we play that board game you really hate, once a year. Or when you time an egg, in 1974.

penguinchris

I like all of the problems people have pointed out, but… the current design isn’t exactly perfect.

Perhaps given all of the options, what we have now is the best compromise. However, the design of the light fixtures and the timing varies wildly as you travel from place to place.

Some places have great lights. Clear and easy to read from a distance. Roads are well-engineered and the lights are maintained. Traffic may still be a problem, but it’s because there are too many drivers, not because of bad road engineering.

Elsewhere, the lights suck. You often can’t tell if it’s red or green because they’re dim, angled to the side, etc. If you’re driving into the sun, forget it – you can’t tell what the signal is. You sometimes have to watch the traffic from the other side to know when to go – but that’s dangerous, because traffic signals aren’t uniform and they may have green when you don’t. There’s no standardization even within the same town, so if you’re not intimately familiar with the intersection you can’t know.

Then there’s the problem of the duration of yellow. We all know that with the introduction of red light cameras, certain towns decrease the length of the yellow light. There are intersections in my town where if you’re going the speed limit you *will* run the red light if you’re past a certain point and it goes to yellow – there is not enough room to stop unless you slam on the brakes (and then only if you have really good brakes), which isn’t safe.

Timers on the signals are *great*. Yes, some people will be more aggressive because of them – but these are the same people who are watching the signal intently, revving the engine and twitching – jumping ahead a few feet when the left turn green goes on, and then flooring it when it’s finally green. Many people I think will avoid this and actually calm down if they know exactly when the light will switch.

You can’t always tell by trying to watch the signal pointing the other direction, as someone suggested – I do watch, but it’s not always possible.

Another thing – you often can’t tell if you triggered the sensor. Usually they’re pretty good these days, but not always. Then you have people who stop well before the line, or past the line. Certain large intersections make this problem worse, but it happens in small intersections too. They don’t trip the sensor, but they don’t realize it. They also don’t realize that the light is never going to change until they trip the sensor. I’ve been stuck in a lineup of 40-50 cars – made me late for school one day back in high school because I was already running late – because the cheerleader in her parents’ SUV in the front stopped past the line and didn’t trip the sensor. Another time I was stuck behind an SUV stopped past the line at a highway offramp. After a few minutes I started getting out of the car to tell them they needed to back up to trip the sensor, when they decided to just run the light.

If there’s a timer, then in those intersections the timer will start when you trip the sensor. That way you know if you did it or not. Of course, *all* signals would have to have timers, or people would still not realize they didn’t trip the sensor because they’ll not realize it’s a light with a timer. Having the timers be large and obvious could help solve that, though.

BTW in Thailand at larger intersections there are timers. The traffic patterns there are quite different, but the timers work great. There’s no hesitation and no anxiety causing people to jump the gun before the signal change.

robertpsmp

In most cities traffic lights that are not on a set timer are triggered either by video camera detection or loop detectors embedded in the pavement. Video cameras are more expensive but more reliable, except for bikes to the far right of the lane which the cameras are often not set up to detect. This is yet another good reason for cyclists to take the lane at intersections.

As for loop detectors, there are a number of different patterns used for embedding the loops in the pavement, of which only one, a large circle with a cross-hatch, is regularly effective at picking up bikes, and only if the bike is on top of the detector in the center of the lane, and not waiting at the right hand curb as many cyclists do. Even then, however, the sensitivity of the loop detector is often thrown off after large vehicles such as semis or trucks pass over them, after which they need to be re-calibrated to detect bikes, motorcycles, or even small cars again.

If you are on a bike (especially an aluminum or carbon frame) and don’t think the signal is detecting you, one good trick is to actually lean or lay your bike down over the sensor, but if that doesn’t work you are then legally allowed to run the red light in most states. After doing so, however, it is also helpful to contact a city employee and request that the detector be calibrated.

Although this particular concept is highly flawed, I do think that some kind of feedback indicating to a person waiting at a light that they have been detected, and how long a wait it will be before they get a green, would encourage a lot more pedestrians and cyclists to not cross against the light. It is a very frustrating experience to wait at lights regularly for 2+ minutes, just to watch the signal change from green to yellow and back to green again without letting you through. It is no wonder that so many cyclists don’t even bother waiting, and if the detection was just as poor for cars we would have had riots in the streets by now.

Hourglass traffic light design

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