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Comment by drfuchs | Hacker News Reader

In Florida (and every other state that I'm aware of), a dead traffic light is, by law, to be treated as an all-way stop sign, so you're supposed to take turns. Traffic lights are so incredibly reliable that many people seem unaware of this fact, though, based on what I've observed. Perhaps the behavior you describe is due to people intentionally disobeying the rules?

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Things get really interesting when there are intersections of multilane highways. For example, an intersection of two 6-lane (3 each way) highways.

With 12 lanes of cars constantly approaching the intersection, that's a lot to keep track of to figure out who goes first.

I saw this recently with Irma in FL. Mostly each set of lanes would start moving roughly together once one person got brave enough to enter the intersection. But it's very hard to adjust to.

I even found myself sometimes just going after stopping without fully checking to see if I had the right-of-way or not.

There used to be a 4-way stop with 11 lanes that I would frequently drive through. It wasn't the prettiest but it worked better than I would've thought.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5600363,-122.2845215,3a,75y,...

In Iraklio, Greece, this is how you drive. We even have a name for it: "Taliban driving". You assume you always have the right-of-way and you go. If you don't, you will never get anywhere. Anyone says otherwise, you tell him to go woohoo himself. And then people from Crete wonder why so many people die in the road every year!

Reminds me of a joke: a guy is riding in a car with his friend when the friend zooms through a red light. The passenger exclaims: “what are you doing, you’re going to get us killed!” The driver says: “don’t worry, I learned to drive from my brother and he drives through red lights all the time.” They approach another red light and again the driver zooms through and the same conversation ensues. A few minutes later they come to a green light and the driver screeches to a halt. “Why are you stopping!? The light is green” says the passenger. The driver replies, “Yeah, my brother might be coming the other way!”

(I thought this was an early George Carlin joke but I can’t say for sure.)

"Taliban Driving"?

In New York we call it driving.

New York's not that bad :)

Traffic lights are often installed in intersections where there are too many cars for an all way stop. When there are a lot of cars approaching an intersection, a traffic light can increase throughput.

All-way stop signs are so ridiculously inefficient. It's no wonder people ignore the rules.

Law has more to do with liability than practicality. Imagine trying to settle a dispute or lawsuit involving a volunteer traffic director, for instance.

People can be incredibly cordial when there aren't any problems or one big common one they can focus their efforts around. It isn't until personal liability enters the equation that the finger-pointing gets going.

It would be nice if they could remove the stop signs for one road and just post yield signs for the intersecting road.

So two ways Stop, two ways Yield? This sounds like an accident waiting to happen and/or an invitation to gratuitous ticket-writing.

Reason being, given that this construction is expressly prohibited in many (most?) jurisdictions, there's clearly no right-of-way rule for such a combined intersection that's universally understood or taught, and I can think of several "reasonable" candidate rules that drivers would invent on-the-fly upon first approaching such an intersection.

As an aside, I'd personally assume that such a "all-way combo" intersection would essentially devolve into an all-way Stop in any case where traffic is either approaching or stopped at two or more cross directions, if only because this seems to be the rule least likely to fail catastrophically against both itself and a variety of other rules.

Does anyone know of any jurisdiction that permits this sort of intersection, and, if so, what the right-of-way rules are there?

> So two ways Stop, two ways Yield?

No, traffic one one road has the right of way and traffic on the intersecting road has to yield the right of way.

This is interesting, in Europe traffic lights are always associated with traffic signs (at least in countries I drove) and one traffic lights are off for some reason, you should obey traffic signs. If the light is on, you ignore the signs.

This way in case of issues with traffic lights or when the city is jammed and they turn off the lights, everyone knows what to do.

lights going out isn't that rare, at least where i'm living, and people know how to handle it. it's just if you have enough lanes of traffic, it's too much coordination to treat it properly like an all-way stop.

I think many people know EXACTLY how to treat a dead traffic light, it's just so uncommon that they forget.

I've seen less than a dozen times either a blinking-red or a dead light.

Blinking red is more confusing than a not-working-at-all traffic light IMHO.

>a dead traffic light is, by law, to be treated as an all-way stop sign

And if people actually did that, it would be a disaster.

I'd like to think the behavior described is due to people not being complete idiots.

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