To me, this is stupid:  why would a subculture of a subculture (the roughly 55,000 QSL-signing Quebecois) want to limit their already limited field available for socializing?

They’re francophones.   Their social interests lie with the French-speaking world. 

To me, this is stupid:  why would a subculture of a subculture (the roughly 55,000 QSL-signing Quebecois) want to limit their already limited field available for socializing?  Why not use ASL and have access to signers in the rest of Canada and all of the USA?   The various dialects of ASL aren’t an impediment and easily learned.

However, I don’t get very exercised about it; it’s not my battle/place/onions (to use a French expression).  So call me counter-empathic to deaf people while you’re at it.

The various solutions for the problem of colour-blind people and traffic lights seem to work for almost all colour-blind people – or so they tell us.  My daltonian father, who first pointed out the traffic light solution to me more than twenty years ago, told me it worked.

So, again, why should non-colour-blind drivers care, eh, unless they’re control-freaks?

I hope that clears that up.

Quite, and thank you. Lots of great explanations here. I guess there’s more to color-blindness than meets the eye ;-)

However, the essential problem is that I often can’t distinguish green from red.  And more often, when they share the same value (that is, of brightness and darkness) I can distinguish between them, I just don’t know which is which.  I’ve owned articles of clothing for years thinking that they’re green only to discover that they’re red or brown later.  And usually after that point, my eyes “correct” somehow, and I re-learn that color.  I vividly remember one day walking towards a bright green tree when it was pointed out that there were bright red flowers in said tree, and they suddenly popped into existence.  It’s usually not that weird, but it can be.

For me, this is not the case with stop lights.  The red is a warmer, orangey-red that I have no trouble with, and the green is a pale, under-saturated green that I also have no problem with.  There are, however, people who have greater degrees of colorblindness than I do, and that includes people who have absolutely no color information in their vision whatsoever.  I hope that clears that up.

But then what about the blind blind? Oh how will they ever drive? The humanity!

All of the colours can be very hard to tell apart depending on what time of the day it is. The only definite for me to tell them apart is based on the position. Red is always on the left or the top.

How easy would it be to tell the shape of those lights from far away? They might just look like round shapes Or the green Go light.

Charts of allowable color ranges at http://www.dialight.com/Assets/Application_Notes/Signaling/Transportation%20Chromaticity%20Standards.pdf

Welcome to the world of counter-empathy.

Would that be before or after someone T-bones you at an intersection. During the week, I bike to work and the school, so for me it’s not empathy, it’s self-preservation. However, I’m reasonably confident not all those people ignoring traffic signals are color-blind.

Okay, my curiosity got the best of me and I checked the largest cities in the rest of the U.S. states and Canadian provinces and territories. In the U.S., I found horizontally-mounted lights in the downtowns of Albuquerque, Houston, and Jacksonville (FL). Like Regina, I found a mix of both in Newark, NJ.

In Canada, in addition to the above, I found horizontal lights in Whitehorse, YT and Charlottetown, PE. But not Halifax, where the picture at the top comes from. In Iqaluit, NU, there are no traffic lights, at least as of a couple years ago.

I’m a lifelong Californian and have only seen horizontally-mounted traffic lights on out-of-state trips, generally around the South.

I used Google Streetview to spot-check the downtowns of the largest cities in every Western U.S. state (AK, HI, WA, OR, CA, NV, ID, MT, WY, UT, CO, AZ, NM), and the only one to feature horizontally mounted traffic lights was Albuquerque. All the rest were vertical. It’s entirely possible that it changes by jurisdiction and other areas of these states could have horizontal lights. But a spot-check of large Western cities certainly suggests that vertical lights are more common than horizontal ones.

So yeah – traffic light accessibility: not quite there yet.

I also wouldn’t agree that “most lights are vertical”. I’ve driven all over the western US and Canada, and I would say that most lights in the west are horizontal. Usually you see vertical lights for a left-turn lane. In older eastern cities like NYC, the lights are vertical. Could be an east-west thing?

Lights at the far side of the intersection make sense to me. Driving in Argentina was a pain because we had to stop right under the light, and crane our necks to look straight up to see when it changed. How does that make any sense?

If you’re not colour blind, what do you care how the lights are arranged?

Welcome to the world of counter-empathy.

As long as the “brightness” of each color is distinct, you can easily distinguish them despite color blindness.

Do you have any idea how difficult and expensive it would be to calibrate and maintain that, not to mention the effects of phenomena like snow?