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Comment by rsfern | Hacker News Reader

Usually you can trigger the electromagnetic sensor if you ride over the edge of it; there's usually a visible seam in the pavement. You want to ride along the edge of the loop.

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Good hack, but you shouldn't have to know how the hardware works to use the product safely. Good infrastructure/urban design should work without people having to think about it.

Around here there's a little white T-shaped line painted where you should roll your bicycle to trigger the light.

That does work most of the time, but I've found that once they pave over it with more asphalt, it becomes difficult to tell where the edge once was.

I have found that traffic lights with camera based detectors work pretty well in terms of detecting cyclists (without the paving over problem that loop detectors have).

Good to know, thanks! What gets me is that a lot of the automatic lights are of a different variety that works fine, and in some cases there's a bike lane up to a light that is incapable of detecting you (without switching lanes, at least).

I’ve never seen a detector like that. All the ones I’ve seen are mounted next to the traffic light and aim down towards where a car would be waiting.

They're very common where I live, but to the best of my knowledge they're weight-based so I'm not sure a cyclist would trigger it.

Usually it's a loop of wire embedded in the pavement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_loop#Vehicle_detecti...

When I rode a moped I would never trigger these things till I started rolling around with a large magnet zip tied to the bottom of my ride.

Hereabouts (Western WA), some cities have actually started painting the location of the sensor, specifically for cyclists. Here's an intersection in Redmond where you can see those.

https://goo.gl/maps/TRmyGzWZDAQ2

Around certain cities in the LA area, the striping crew paints a stencil of a cyclist and an arrow pointing forward over the sensor.

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