> In the UK, in 2009, it was revealed that the Department for Transport had previously discouraged green waves as they reduced fuel usage, and thus less revenue was raised from fuel taxes.
Ugh...
The degree by which governments routinely violate the accounting principle of matching revenues to expenses is awful.
A carbon tax on consumers (incl. businesses) is effective at producing good market behavior regardless of how the tax revenue is spent.
In the example I reacted to, a government agency actively worked to inhibit that behavior in order to preserve its revenue. Your point would hold if governments didn't have the power to do things like this.
> Earmarked funds are stuck.
If the revenue is being raised to pay for damage caused by society, those funds should be stuck to that purpose and should rise and fall based on the level of damage being done.
A governmental bad actor is basically orthogonal to the idea of a carbon tax. The government could equally try to increase sales of liquor and cigarettes for sin taxes, or go around murdering people for the estate taxes. The UK example is shameful but reflects on that government body rather than the specific tax on petrol.
The problem is earmarking or allocating a variable set of revenue as funding for something unrelated, and in particular something unrelated that's otherwise valuable or important.
And NOT earmarking or allocating 'sin taxes' to pay for the supposed costs of those sins, borne by the public in the form of the government, seems pretty stupid (to me) if it's actually necessary or desirable for the government to 'manage' those sins or those sin's consequences.
There is this thing called the "waiting time paradox" [0] (or more generally the "inspection paradox") that suggests a surprising thing, the average time between discrete events observed by many other randomly interspersed observation is the same as the average time between events. This should be surprising, because it suggests that many more people experience times LONGER than the average wait to balance out people who experience a shorter wait because they were randomly closer to the event.
This happens because longer intervals, when they do exist, get a larger proportion of the random observations than the shorter intervals between events. More precisely and generically, when the quantity being observed affects the observer, the observations will be distorted by the quantity in question and have to be normalized.
In the case of a green wave, those rare times when someone waits too long on a green because they were looking at their phone or a naked person in a nearby window and create slowdowns and stalls in the pipeline? Those moments are longer, so there is a longer window where you could experience them.
This actually comes up a lot in observations of things in nature. Imagine if instead of light flips or bus arrivals we were observing clicks on a geiger counter and you'll realize how fundamental this is to experiencing the world.
tl;dr: The Green Wave only works in averages and it can be correct even as your experience of it never working is also correct. :)
[0]: https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-parad...
Of course traffic was heavy enough that you'd be stuck behind someone doing the speed limit most days, but sometimes you got to ride the wave.
Timed lights work, I've seen it in action. Top of my head, Indianapolis 20 some years ago, Capitol Avenue going north I'd bet you could go from (what is effectively) Zero Street to 38th and not hit a red light.
If two cars both say they drive at 50 km/h, and one is actually 45 km/h and the other 55 km/h, that is quite a bit relative margin of error. And we only need two cars like that in the whole group to start causing problems.
If you can't design a green wave to be tolerant of varying speeds, then it isn't useful.
Great Highway in SF, if you drive 35MPH you will just get greens on the evenly spaced lights. The worst is when you get stuck behind a person who drives 40, then brakes heavily, then drives 40, then brakes heavily, etc.
Here it's street view of the road, it's not perfectly visible, because those are LED displays: https://goo.gl/maps/T7RzQCUS4nk3QVZN9
Edit: (or go double the speed limit if you must but please stop creating stops)
It was one my little pleasures to drive along that at 35 (or 30, I forget what the speed limit was) and see cars zip ahead at each light at 45, only to watch them ride the brakes as they hit the next red.
Imagine a translucent checker board of blue and black squares overlaid on top of a map of roads. You can see the color of the squares but you can also see the roads underneath them.
If a light falls on a blue square, make its principal north/south direction Red at t=0 and it’s principal east/west direction green. For black squares do the opposite.
Calculate how long it would take cars to travel through each square unimpeded. It helps if this time is roughly the same regardless of direction. It also helps if the squares are roughly large enough that it takes roughly one light phase worth of time to travel through it. Call that time N.
At t=N, switch the lights to the opposite color, so now north/southbound traffic gets green lights on blue squares, and east/west gets red. Black squares get the opposite.
What you’ll see if you imagine yourself as a car driving through this, is that as you enter a black square as it turns green, the green lights will stay green until you enter the nearest blue square, at which point the phase shifts and now the blue square gets green lights as you drive through it.
This works in both directions, with both north and south bound traffic.
Now, this falls apart when roads are diagonal, although it’s mitigated if diagonal roads have higher speed limits. It also means if you make a turn, you’re in the wrong light cycle, but it will correct itself after the next red light.
It also doesn’t work well at all if you have left turn arrows complicating your light cycles, so you’ll need to have something like a Michigan Left and the requisite wide medians to make this work.
It’s not as ideal as I described in real life, but the basic principle works.