Traffic lights worldwide set to change after a Swedish engineer saw red
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
What a bunch of pricks. Vogons couldn't have done any worse than the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying.
In this case, the guy had training as an electric engineer, but was commenting outside of his proven realm of expertise. However, he wasn't deceiving the public by representing himself as an engineer-for-hire, though, which I think makes it forgivable. I just found the free speech ruling to be over-broad.
Let's take this case as an example. Anyone can send a letter saying "The traffic light is too short; here's the math to prove it". Saying "I'm an engineer" might help you get that letter noticed, but it would almost certainly be illegal to reprogram the light without a professional engineer's sign-off independent of that letter no matter the person's qualifications. The state was never at risk of acting on his advice no matter how he represented himself. So why not let him say it?
(For context: I work in the field and am not a registered engineer, though I studied it in university. I would never call myself an engineer)
What do you call yourself?
I have a degree in EE, but there's a 0% chance I could safely design electrical equipment. In school they taught me how to analyze circuits, but I know nothing of the electrical code, let alone practical matters like mechanical stresses on wires. Without somebody to learn from, I would learn a lot of things the hard way—when the design fails.
I am a licensed professional engineer with a B.Sc. in EE, so I've gone through every part of the process for designing electrical equipment except for acquiring work experience in that subfield. The only thing preventing me from signing off on an electrical drawing is that I do not believe I am qualified.
Now of course that doesn't mean that you can just start building bridges as a non-accredited engineer, I expect the courts would look unkindly on you in a negligence lawsuit if your company had engineers that couldn't demonstrate their professional qualifications and development.
This is seen as a problem and the professional bodies are pushing more states to adopt mandatory registration, so we'll see more of that in the next few years, but it's not like Australia is a land where bridges fall down weekly without mandatory registration.
Also amusing that it's a Swedish person fighting with the American mindset (My Constitutions!). It's very rare to see those.
It takes ~8 years to fulfill the requirements to acquire a professional license. It's not worth the risk of being caught.
That’s not an insult, I’m sure you’re quite skilled. But outside of the software industry “engineer” is a term that signifies certification.
I've always wondered this: why are software engineers allowed to use the title "Engineer" but aren't at all required to do FE or any certification?
It's very strange. I always thought certification was about being able to be employed as an engineer, not use the title.
Things get trickier with software as well - with many engineering disciplines, the public can be placed in harm's way by the malpractice of engineering - that's why many civil firms require PE's. In other areas, it's less desirable - for defense contractors, many purposely avoid PE's due to our ethical obligations around harming the public.
Surrounding software, I think a major part of it is just that the laws haven't caught up with the times. NCEES now has a Software PE available but no clue about the contents of the exam. It seems like a tricky one to test for.
Near as I could tell, it was a rent-seeking and exclusionary agenda of some entrenched parties. The proposed exam requirement for software engineers didn't go anywhere.
It has little to do with languages and frameworks and more on principles and practices.
I'm biased as my undergrad was one of the first to become certified.
My CS program was in my school's college of engineering, which had a much more rigorous application process than the lib arts school. The first two years were essentially the same for CS, CE, MechE, ChemE, etc - lots of math and physics.
Maybe I'm just a bit sore. While society doesn't stereotype us as badly as before - the typical low status nerd - most of that improvement is due to SV engineers making such good money. But it still feels like we're not respected the same as other higher paying careers like law, medicine, or even other types of engineers. I mean I've actually had managers who probably make less than me assign me remedial tasks like fixing their laptop or resetting their password.
It's a shame, because it's only one of them that I feel will stand the test of time.
Most “actual engineers” do trivial shit just like most software engineers/developers.
But I do agree that developing software is usually more of an art than a science and a lot of software engineers just make business apps where not much of the engineering background is required.
And so dental tourism is a thing.
While yes the quality will be very high, that's not summation of all that matters.
If I am contesting traffic ticket, I might accept a lawyer without $300k in student debt. Same if I want a tooth cleaning or a strep test.
By all means have bodies of accreditation but don't force me to use them, especially in common low-risk scenarios.
The giving-medical-advice thing was a dig at a formerly popular television host.
That said, a doctor misrepresenting themself as a physician and giving medical advice where not licensed to do practice medicine, as done by Dr. Phil, is wildly unethical.
There are however many, many more professions which require specialty training and are protected: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/regprof/index.cf...
2. He claimed to be a P.Eng, without being one.
This undermines the profession, at loss to the public. I can go around, giving unsolicited medical advice all I want. I can't go around, giving unsolicited medical advice, while claiming to be a MD - and for good reason.
[Citation needed]
He claimed to be an engineer. The ruling preserved license requirements to claim yourself a "professional engineer" and "registered professional engineer" [0].
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/02/oregon_engineer_lic...
It's not an unreasonable position.
Perhaps a person who is trained as an electrical engineer and who has a history of employment as a researcher and developer of audio electronics (in Oregon) should not think of or refer to themselves as an 'engineer' unless they are licensed in the jurisdiction they happen to be in, but this is a problem with a simple fix, and it is a problem unique to Oregon.
It does? I've seen really good engineering done by people who don't even have degrees in engineering (or degrees at all, for that matter). Contrariwise, utter disasters by people who were supposed to be incredibly professional.
For the most part, being a PE is about liability, and the technical stuff is there for show. It has nothing to do with "undermining the profession", it's all about who can sue whom when something falls over.
No, hats off to the a-holes on the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying. They need to be humiliated even more thoroughly than this. This needs to be national and international front-page news. Let these petty tyrants know that heroes exist.
This story keeps popping up with updates. What a great saga.
And, of course, Mr. Järlström deserves all the kudos, free beer, pizza -- a few $$ that might help defray costs? Where to send?
They'd do better to change it for a countdown just like they do with the crosswalk sign that counts down from 15 seconds or something before going to a solid amber for a couple of seconds before going red. They'd also do well to have some kind of markers on the road indicating a safe distance from the traffic lights to come to a stop in an average family car (whatever that means) in current weather conditions.
However, behaviour adjusts as we become complacent, and it's in our nature to become complacent with that which we are acclimated to every day. We definitely need some consideration for that factor and we definitely need a design that goes further to ensuring that people aren't tempted to run the lights. The temptation to run them "just this once" because "I'm late" or "I've already sat 3 changes in this line up and I'm pissed off with waiting" or "I'm sure I can beat the red" needs to be removed.
Where I live you're safe from the red light camera if your front-two tires are over the white line when the light changes to red. Sounds like in Oregon you're only safe if you're out of the intersection when it turns red, which seems entirely absurd, especially for tourists / newcomers to the area. How am I supposed to know how quickly your yellow light changes on this street?
What if an obstruction appears in the road - a pedestrian or a u-turning car? Are you just meant to plow into them?
I'm guessing you're supposed to get the robot-generated penalty, get your court date, take the day off of work, and plead your blindingly-obvious case to the court.
..... /or/ they could change to make the offense fire if you enter the intersection illegally instead of exit "illegally". :-\
Completely nutty.
"London green" we call it.
In Germany there is a 1 second grace period after the light switches to red. And apparently, even if your tires crossed the stop line after the 1st second, you will not get a ticket if the photo series shows you did not move across the intersection.
Urban rumors are that some taxi drivers used this to empty the (physical) film rolls on the cameras by slowly rolling forward and back across the line past the 1 second rule. I guess this does not work so well with digital storage.
Indeed. For many years, there was a nasty traffic light in the Stuttgart city center (at the Main Station) which was guarded by a traffic camera. It was positioned inside a very sharp turn, and it was very difficult to notice that the light was changing to red if you were already on a position of the road which was too close to the intersection to see the large overhead traffic lights, but too far away to see the small traffic light at the side of the road. I remember my father sometimes only coming to a stop a meter past the traffic light, which always triggered the camera. It never resulted in a ticket, though, as he was standing and not moving.
This is also the reason why it's never a good idea to flip off the camera. A court decided that looking at pictures of people showing the finger would have an emotional impact on the person analyzing them later so the fine in this case is much greater.
When light turns red, it does not mean other light in the crossing turns green immediately. At the crossing for sometime all the lights should be red, to cover the case of signal change after a vehicle has entered the crossing.
You are supposed to be an income source for American Traffic Solutions, Redflex Traffic Systems, and the city in question. It isn't about safety anymore. It is about money.
Cities are known across the country to make yellow timing extra short to increase the money. https://www.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...
If red light cameras were about safety, the addition of warning signs "Red Light Camera Intersection" ahead of the lights would drastically reduce the amount of dangerous behavior.
That isn't how the incentives work, though. Instead they hide them, throwing away the powerful deterrent they've created, in an attempt to make money from the unwary.
It was also an intersection that had tons of accidents from people running the light before the camera was installed.
https://saferstreetsla.org/679/case-studies-longer-yellow-li...
Also increasing yellow light duration is significantly cheaper than contracting out a network of cameras to a vendor who takes over half the revenue from each ticket.
It's cheaper for society, yes. It's much more expensive if you're the government notionally "paying" for that contract. It's paid out of revenues you didn't have before.
The idea is to stop people running red lights everywhere, not just at red light locations.
If you run red lights, you should be banned from driving just like if you speed. The roads are unsafe enough as it is.
If it was about safety, it would only hit people when the crossing traffic light turned green.
Care to tell that to Amazon or Wal-Mart?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
https://newrepublic.com/article/146540/amazon-thriving-thank...
This is quite implausible, of course, which is why it's never explicitly argued, but the entire criticism falls apart without that assumption.
It's interesting you take the position that Walmart is helpless to pay its workers more, as if they were some mom and pop operation.
As always, I'm never sure which side of Hanlon's Razor to fall on, since the level of stupidity and the level of malice required for either explanation are off the charts
Most employers of relatively unskilled labor pay poverty wages because they can get the labor they are seeking at that price, and they haven't identified ways to get sufficiently better returns paying more to justify higher pay.
> and what can one of the biggest (or biggest) private employers in America do about it?
Why should they?
I'd rather just tax capital earnings as income, tax high-end income more, and fund a UBI than expect employers to act irrationally as public benefit agencies.
I think being able to reinvest profits into your own company is a great thing to be able to do. But I don't believe it's ethical to pay people little in order to reinvest in your own company and certainly not without the input of the workers affected. When Amazon's own workers are unable to do the very same thing -- reinvesting their own profits into themselves -- then Amazon's workers are certainly fleeced by a private corporation along the way.
Low wages are just the starting point here; any member of a community which is receiving less than a living wage also needs support from the community. Sometimes that support comes from friends and family or churches. Often it comes directly from your tax money.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing to send my tax money to help people though. I'm absolutely saying that I shouldn't have to. Large corporations reap millions and billions from their own employees. Why, exactly, is it fair that they should profit at the expense of the actual real humans doing their work?
I think I understand what you are saying, but let me make sure. Are you saying you think corporate tax should be funding people in need and not personal tax (whether it property, sales, income, etc.)? To be honest, in my original comment I didn't really think about where the tax should come from, but I think I do agree with you. I do think something like a universal income could allow corporations more freedom as they'd be freed from the burden of feeding, clothing, housing, and healing an entire nation.
While I think a universal income is a laudable goal, I do not think our economy is automated enough to support it.
You don't think corporations should share the burden of feeding, clothing, housing, and healing the nation in which it reaps its profits?
I see. I live in an heavy income tax state, so I think that is why my mind went there initially.
> You don't think corporations should share the burden of feeding, clothing, housing, and healing the nation in which it reaps its profits?
Oh I do, I just don't want those things connected to employment. I am not comfortable with the current coupling of health care and employment, but corporations paying adequate taxes to fund these services offered to all I'm all for.
Thanks for the reasonable conversation, by the way. This thread has helped me learned more and think about different viewpoints on this topic.
Here in Indiana you’re supposed to stop on yellow if you can safely.
That’s hard to judge for law enforcement but an easy rule for drivers to follow, if they would in fact do so. Doesn’t matter then how long the yellow light is.
https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-9-motor-vehicles/in-code-...
50 mph is 264000 feet per hour. This converts to 73.3 feet per second. 300' means you need to signal about four seconds before turning or changing lanes.
When I turn off of rural highways with 50+ mph speed limits, I signal about the same time I let off the gas to start slowing for the turn. Braking is at least a few seconds later, turning is well after that.
One of the challenges of traffic planning is that people will do what feels comfortable and is working; it’s not really worth writing laws to force them out of that unless there’s an oil crisis or a municipal revenue crisis.
First, signage is generally awful in Indiana. I often don’t know that I’m turning 300’ in advance.
Second, I’d prefer a rule that’s simpler to follow but still (I think) achieves the same effect for those sharing the road: start signaling at least one second before you decelerate.
Third, treating this as a money-making operation for the police is perverse.
> In rural areas, the Junction assembly should be installed at least 400 feet in advance of the intersection. In rural areas, the minimum distance between a Junction assembly and either a Destination sign or an Advance Route Turn assembly should be 200 feet.
INDOT conveniently doesn't comply with this paragraph. You often only get a sign at the intersection itself with no advance. You're left guessing where the intersection actually is and when to slow down and signal.
https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-9-motor-vehicles/in-code-...
A yellow light only indicates that the light is changing to red, and that the right of way is ending (as marked by a red light). There is nothing that states what a driver must/supposed-to do when facing a yellow light.
Assuming a driver is obeying all other traffic laws, a driver is lawfully allowed to enter an intersection on a yellow light, regardless of whether they have the time to stop or not.
In most (all?) US jurisdictions, drivers are taught that if the light is yellow, you should stop if you can do so safely.
Since it difficult to remember which in which jurisdictions this applies, I always make sure to stop for yellow if I can do so safely.
This not being the rule where I was from (Virginia), I stopped by the DMV and picked up the handbook to see what else might be different, only to find that the rule was essentially the same as in Virginia (must enter intersection before it turns red).
It's not explicitly illegal to change lanes in an intersection but it is often unsafe.
Iowa
Michigan
Mississippi
Nebraska
New Jersey
Oregon
Virginia
Wisconsin
1: www.jarlstrom.com/PDF/Exhibit_1_FINAL_An_investigation_of_the_ITE_formula_and_its_use_R14.pdf
In practice, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red#North_America everywhere in the US has had right turn on red unless otherwise signed since 1980. Except for New York City, apparently...
Thanks.
Mr. Jarlstrom's wife may have been an outlier for the hardware and software that calculates the tickets. But, overall, the system is catching folks who are breaking the law.
Reducing the accidents (injuries and damages) is better than catching more people.
Well then maybe they should increase the time available for a left turn instead of using it as an opportunity to collect revenue.
Does it matter? If you're a tourist/newcomer, simply don't try to make it through a yellow light just because you can. If you can stop, do so.
In Oregon, it's not absurd to be safe only when out of the intersection. As a "restrictive yellow" state, the yellow cycle time includes the time to completely clear the intersection. IOW, the yellow cycle time is longer than it would be otherwise.
Yes, without understanding that the yellow times are longer, it would seem absurd.
That may get you rear-ended or barely so, because the driver behind may be accustomed to the usual traffic of the area going through, and perhaps he may be the one who should stop, but is not expecting you to.
The problem is, I've never known if that means entered the crosswalk or passed through the crosswalk and entered the rest of the intersection.
As a driver, you are not supposed to know this, nor should you base your driving based on this information.
It's simple: if you have enough distance to stop, you stop[1].
The yellow light is supposed to be timed so that people who don't have the distance to stop when going the speed limit would have enough time to legally pass the intersection[2].
The engineer's case (and many others) is that the lights are adjusted specifically so that this does not happen, i.e. people on a certain stretch of a road have are forced to cross on red if they don't decelerate unsafely.
-------------
[1] Your stopping distance only depends on your speed, road conditions, and reaction time.
[2]http://redlightrobber.com/red/links_pdf/Derivation-of-the-Ye...
I'm a big fan of the "green for a few seconds then flashing yellow" arrow.
When I lived in Tucson AZ almost every light was set up for lagging left turns. Where you can go when it's safe, but in the event of heavy traffic you'd be able to count on having a green arrow to empty the left turn lane - worked great!
You can't demand and reward excellence with car driving, because by assuming that people are all highly competent, you'll end up with lots of fatal crashes because of all the people who aren't competent. You can only assume car drivers are competent in societies where there's plenty of options for people who don't or can't drive, and America made the decision to not be such a society, so everyone has to be able to drive, even if they're an idiot.
Sorry, but that's completely impossible. You simply cannot have a spread-out, car-based society with "reasonable alternatives" for people who can't drive, unless perhaps you're going to heavily subsidize Uber and Lyft. Buses and trains don't work well in suburbs; trains only make sense with enough density to have enough ridership, and buses only make sense to fill in where train lines don't exist. In the suburbs, people stuck taking the bus get penalized with ridiculously long transit times, because the bus takes a long, circuitous route, only comes once or twice an hour, etc. That isn't a "reasonable alternative" when people with a car get get there in 10 minutes or less.
So you have two choices: a society like Germany's where at least in urban areas it's easy to get around without a car, and then you can have a very high competency requirement for car drivers; or a society like America's, where the whole society is designed for cars (except for a small handful of urban cores) and you have to have a car to achieve a middle-class existence, so you cannot have a high competency requirement because otherwise you are restricting peoples' right to movement and travel.
The way it is now (with the sprawl that we currently have), yes, due to physics. You can't change physics. There just isn't any way to make a bus a viable transit alternative in a sprawling suburban area; everything is just too far apart.
>Why can't we begin to restructure our society to be more like, in your example; Germany, so that it is possible?
Well I wasn't really talking about long-term, I was talking more short-term, with the assumption that the sprawl we have will remain or be extended. I simply don't see any attempts in this country to increase density, except perhaps the "urban growth boundary" around Portland.
Sure, I'd love to see this country decide it wants to be more like Germany or Japan and stop all new sprawl, and instead require higher density development near city cores, so that public transit is more feasible, and also provide more funding for transit construction (since that usually drives density: people frequently want to live close to the subway stations). But there's a lot of fanciful things that I'd like to have; that doesn't mean very many people agree with me, and I don't see much agreement with me on this issue in America today, at least not from the voters.
I find that an odd perspective on successful public safety rules and policies with the aim of reducing serious injury and death during a dangerous activity.
Specifically related to driving: I believe that the licensing requirements should be slightly higher and that more should be done to guard against bad driving and not just illegal driving. E.g. I've never seen anyone get a ticket for getting on the highway going a third of the speed of traffic, but that's certainly dangerous. Instead, people get tickets for exceeding a limit set by the capabilities of the lowest common denominator by a small percentage regardless of conditions (often not particularly dangerous - not an excuse for reckless driving, of course).
I simply think that there are better solutions. For one, public transportation.
In other states, like Washington, the red arrow is equivalent to the red circle. We even have left-turn-on-red, so (unless you’re stuck behind an out-of-towner) this tends to be much less of an issue.
(For instance, Kentucky is no left-turn-on-red [either red arrow or full red; mostly the state doesn't use red arrows because they'd be redundant in that case], but allows for left-turn-may-yield on flashing yellow/amber.)
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181101-01/?p=10...
https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.055
I've never done it myself and don't intend to start since I think it's a bit obscure and I don't want to argue with a cop about it if I get pulled over.
It took a while to get used to because in the past there simply just won't be any signal, to imply you can go if you want.
It's a separate light to make the flashing-yellow to solid-yellow transition clearer.
I always thought this was normal. If the right turn arrow is green you have right of way, if it's red you must stop, and if it's not illuminated you give way to oncoming traffic and turn when safe.
I.e. if you at or very close to the line you prepare to stop but if your very close you proceed carefully and make the turn.
(Anyway, in most places the fines from the automatic cameras do not go to the same administration that decides the speed limits and places the traffic lights, so in the end the common accusation of "they only want to make money from it" doesn't make that much sense)
He meant jurisdictions in America. Local governments here are infamous for shortening yellow lights. The companies that make automated cameras even have it in their contracts that the cities must do this.
Citation?
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/red-light-camera-controve... "The contracts in place with red-light camera providers often specify maximum yellow light times, and impose financial penalties if the city lengthens the yellow period."
More: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/10/chicago-shortens... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-red-light-camera-yell... https://www.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...
There's a lot of room for weaseling the way that's written. The contracts could specify maximum times to cover incorrect configurations like 2 minutes - that would be sensible. Technically the article is correct but it leads the reader to conclude malicious intent where there may be none.
Only the DigitalTrends article talked about contract imposed maximums. In the Chicago article it looks like the city that was acting in bad faith. There is no established link between provider imposed contracts violating best practices.
Also, checking behind you has minimal value for drivers. Rather than any pattern it should be your absolutely last priority as it very rarely provides useful information and may be dangerous. That said, you should maintain basic awareness behind you.
...unless you are entering a situation where you may need to decide if stopping is preferable to some other option.
In one case, I’d say checking my rearview was worth thousands of dollars and maybe three lives. When approaching a crosswalk and reducing my speed to stop for pedestrians I saw clearly the guy behind me wasn’t going to stop (he maintained his speed and was looking down, probably texting). I honked and flashed to warn the pedestrians who stayed out of the crosswalk. Then I took my foot off the brake as the other car hit me. The damage was minimal because I just let him push me. I pulled into a nearby parking lot. The other guy took off without stopping. It was a new car so no rear plate.
If I hadn’t looked I’d have tried to stop, been pushed into the pedestrians anyway unless they noticed on their own, and my car would likely have been totaled.
Also, talking your foot off the break increased the risk in that accident. If the driver had swerved at the last second they could have sent your car into the pedestrians you where trying to protect. In a rear end collision momentum pulls your foot from the peddle. So, you want to be hard breaking at the moment of impact to minimize the distance you move post collision.
Honking may have been useful, however unless you gave then ~2+ seconds of warning it was probably futile. Walking speed may be 4.5 feet per second, but acceleration and reaction times are not instantaneous.
No one suggested doing anything of the kind.
Regarding my collision, you're just making stuff up.
That was the OP situation.
> Oh, and I just completed my regular mirror check, and so I don't know how long the yellow has been up. Do I stop or continue on?
As to breaking, or saving the car:
https://www.cartalk.com/content/bracing-impact-it-better-bra...
On it’s own that’s not going to make a huge difference, but I have seen recommendations to apply the parking break for similar reasons.
> Oh, and I just completed my regular mirror check, and so I don't know how long the yellow has been up. Do I stop or continue on?
These statements are not describing the same activity.
> As to breaking, or saving the car:
Your link agrees with me. Read Tom's last paragraph. There was no traffic in front of me. The pedestrians were safely off the road because I honked and flashed. In the case that the pedestrians had kept going, I'd have done things differently. But it doesn't matter; because the point isn't whether braking or not braking was the correct decision.
The point is that by looking in the rear view mirror I became aware that a decision needed to be made.
Yes they are. The window when the length of a yellow light matters is short. If check your rear view mirror right before the intersection then even if the light turns yellow that’s irrelevant you’re still going to cross. Alternatively, if you’re very far from the intersection, then not noticing a yellow light for ~2 seconds is irrelevant, you need to stop regardless of how long it’s been yellow at that point. The transition between those states is very rapid.
> The pedestrians where safely off the road.
There was still pedestrians around you. A rear end collision that’s directly bumper to bumper pushes you forward. But, it’s possible for someone to try and evade at the last second which means they and you go in some random direction, possibly onto a sidewalk or other objects near the road.
Examples of off angle impacts with solid barriers: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/21/iihs-crash-tests-slam-some-p.... Though if these where cars the car would be violently pushed in the opposite direction.
Various rear end collisions: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HD6QGx9d8ow. Which show a wide range of possibilities.
So, unless they where well behind you, picking your foot off the break was a poor choice for their safety.
No, they aren't. You misrepresented his point, and now you're changing the argument.
> So, unless they where well behind you, picking your foot off the break was a poor choice for their safety.
You're still making things up. Nothing you have linked here supports your claims. When a car collides with another car, things can happen with variable degrees of predictability. Yet, you are arguing with certainty that despite a successful outcome I made the wrong decision in a situation for which you don't have all the facts. I'm not sure how you hope any of this will convince me I did the wrong thing.
Perhaps ironically, even by arguing that there was a right thing to do, you implicitly acknowledge that your previous statement about rear view mirrors which I objected to was wrong.
No, I said his situation was avoidable and said how to avoid it, thus invalidating his point. Talking about how to safely drive drunk ignores the possibility to not get into that situation.
As to your situation, you where not responding to a traffic light. In my original post I specifically said maintaining awareness was import, just a low priority. Checking your rear view window while breaking is perfectly reasonable as long as your not maneuvering to avoid a collision. As described not checking the rear view minor would have likely resulted in a near identical outcome, honking may have have helped or been pointless we don’t know.
As to making things up, my statement is in response to the correct action on a rear end collision based on the information you had at the time. Saying it was a good idea using information unavailable at the time is like lottery winners saying they made the correct choice. However, as people can’t actually see the future it’s possible to make a poor gamble that pays off.
Similarly, you where lucky that the oncoming car did not swerve at the last second which you had not way of predicting or responding to as your limited by human reaction times. The first videos I showed demonstrated my point but I don’t think you understand the physics involved. Watch the first shot here. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JszLYsU1Duo On a side impact ball 1 moves to the left, and ball 2 moves to the right. Now, considering that rewatch the first video with that idea. If you where rear ended at an angle you could have been shoved into the direction of the sidewalk as the other car was shoved away. The second video I posed starts with a collision like with a car being shoved to the left, except it’s hitting a stationary school buss who’s breaks and higher mass avoid significant movement.
If you still don’t understand, I can only suggest learning some basic physics from online videos or whatnot.
PS: And really your argument about not breaking is balancing people’s safety vs an slightly lower repair bill. That’s really hard to justify.
I think I'll keep tracking who's behind me, how close, whether anyone new has appeared, whether anyone looks likely to pass me soon, and so on, because it's sure as hell been important in practice. Most notably when something goes even slightly wrong in front of me.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/362/schedule/14/made says: "(9) An amber signal, when shown alone, conveys the same prohibition as red, except that, as respects any vehicle which is so close to the stop line that it cannot safely be stopped without proceeding beyond the stop line, it conveys the same indication as the green signal which was shown immediately before it."
If you interpret this to the letter, it means that if there's no car behind you, you should indeed come to a screeching halt at an amber light. If it's "safe" to stop, then amber means stop.
Not saying I agree with this, but that's what the law says.
Maybe we're using "screeching" differently. If I need to jam on the brakes such that there is a chance the car my skid, or someone with a seatbelt might be injured, that is not "safe," and the law says I should keep going. Absent those things, I'm not screeching to stop but just stopping short.
Is there a definition of "safe to stop"? I would imagine a screeching halt wouldn't qualify.
This bugs me. $50 of hardware can accomplish this, today. Raspi running vehicle detection code. If something is coming and the other way is clear, why not flip the intersection before it arrives?
$50 * 300 000 (quick google search about the number of traffic light in the US), That's not taking into account installation and regular maintenance.
I'm all for optimising things but sometimes it's just not worth the hassle. A well timed orange light is good enough.
That's only true if you want hardware that sometimes detects some kind of vehicles, in the right weather and from the right angles.
Truly reliably detecting this is much further away. The consequences of not getting it right are not as catastrophic as getting it wrong in a self-driving car, but they could still mess traffic up pretty badly.
Your reaction might be that it has been $50 for like 5 or 10 years now, and if so my response is that in this area, that is recent. It's a pretty slow-moving, late adopter industry. Most of the equipment getting installed probably hasn't been redesigned in years or decades. The people approving stuff want to buy from known vendors. The vendors are making money steadily now and don't want to go out on a limb with unproven tech.
Which doesn't mean it's impossible. I interpret it the opposite way: the fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't or can't. I would expect it to take this long or longer.
Also, I think the angle for getting this adopted isn't really efficiency, it's cost saving. Right now, some lights are on sensors (instead of just timing) but they do it with induction loops (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_loop). If you could match or surpass the reliability of those at a lower cost, you might get people to switch.
But once you've crossed that hurdle, you can improve efficiency too, of course.
Of course, you have to keep in mind that the camera has to be mounted in the proper position. So it's probably not really $50 of hardware unless you can (in most cases, at least) piggyback on something that already exists. Although that seems possible because the signal light does need to be visible by cars approaching the intersection.
Some sort of half-local/half-global optimization algorithm running in the "smart grid" would be a good idea.
Traffic simulations are generally quite complex. In your proposal, if your approach is not detected correctly, you either stop traffic for a car which isn’t there, or you never stop traffic for a car which is there.
It’s hard to imagine, given how bad traffic is, that our streets were planned by sophisticated computer simulations. There’s one place near me where it can take nearly an hour to go 3 blocks during rush hour, due to people blocking the box. Do simulations take that into account?
At that scale trying to do anything clever will cost billions. Most red lights don't even detect motorcycles standing right on top of their sensor, we're decades away from smart lights detecting your car speed/distance and computing the most optimised yellow light timing.
Also, in most cases you should be able to roll off the throttle and coast to the light without having to aggressively brake. If it's not the case the yellow light is not timed well and you can contact the company handling the roadwork in your city.
One of these is really stupid, and one isn't.
That sounds like something a dashcam would be able to easily show.
I’d be very curious to see how a blinking green system plays out in tests.
Another thought: if we manage traffic like regulating fluid flow and pressure, we could avoid situations where a single car exiting a parking lot shuts down the highway instantly. That single car should have to wait maybe 5-10 seconds before triggering the lights, and the blinking green would let highway drivers adjust. Forcing 20 cars to rapidly stop for an already stopped car makes no sense.
As the single car waits, pressure “builds” so to speak, and eventually the light decides that the fluid flow should change.
For example: https://goo.gl/maps/Z7vDzEimPLZvyXuK6
Frankly, it's strange to me that even 0.12 sec was not enough, if the camera was only focused on the entry into the intersection. My guess is that it was shooting rear plates in the intersection, and catching turning cars (to maximize revenue)... Of course there are states where entering under a yellow is prohibited, but then we've legislated Pi to be 3 too.
Now, I have also seen Bostonians jump off the line before a light turned green and that would certainly have me stomping my brakes into a stale yellow, but I'm not sure it's safer.
What dumbasses came up with that rule? Isn't the whole point of the yellow light to signal that it will turn red soon, and that people have to make a choice?
So if you drive up to a green light then you have to stop, wait for the red light and then drive when it turns green again to ensure that you're not running a yellow light.
In practice yellow phases are too long and taken by many as a signal to speed up and speed through. I don't think police enforce the rules here, but this is clearly prohibited.
If you are still travelling fast at the lights when they turn red, you must have been ignoring the yellow light, so this makes no sense. The whole point of the yellow light is to ensure that you have time to stop before the lights go red, making running the red lights inexcusable.
Not that I've never run a red light, I'm no angel, but this argument is absurd.
That's how I learned it in Germany, anyway.
Especially professional drivers act like yellow is "speed up" light. There's not a single day when I don't notice multiple people driving on red during my commute.
The conclusion is that overall people's behaviour wouldn't change much when there was more yellow time (in both 'stopping' and 'running' drivers). But that for a small portion of the 'running' drivers (the 'risk takers', who also just won't stop if the light has already turned red) the amount who jumped red would reduce.
In the time after that I noticed a lot more cars that I felt where jumping the red light. But if that is due to the increase of the decision time or that the changing to red for one lane and change to green for the other lane are closer together I don't know.
[0] https://nos.nl/artikel/2090320-verkeerslichten-langer-op-ora... [1] http://content1b.omroep.nl/urishieldv2/l27m0dd08d46743dff390...
I've pined for that tech in every place I've lived since. :-D
https://nypost.com/2012/10/08/citys-gotcha-traffic-cameras-u...
Wow, as described this is outrageous. It's not like he was out there changing the lights himself. He made a proposal. I guess that's why he won the court case, although I think that might go too far as well: requiring licenses for engineers makes sense. It should be required for actually implementing changes, though, not just talking about them.
In civil engineering, some engineer on the project (usually the head engineer) has to be licensed, and has to sign off on it, and this makes him liable if the engineering is faulty.
What happened in this guy's case is simply that, in his letter, he called himself "an engineer", and the state board slapped a fine on him for the audacity of calling himself an engineer without a PE license. He wasn't "practicing", he was making a proposal in the form of a letter.
It's good that he got it reverse and free speech won, but look at what he had to do to accomplish that. The state board should be forced to pay him an enormous fine for attempting to restrict his free speech.
If you close to the intersection you might still see green or yellow very briefly but the act of slowing down to turn left is enough for you to run in red light territory and get fined.
There apparently is a formula that calculates how long travelers need to leave the intersection and, presumably, if you are still there it means you ran red light. It seems the formula is wrong as it does not grant enough time for lawful travelers in normal conditions.
The condition of waiting for oncoming traffic to clear the intersection so that you may safely make a turn across the oncoming traffic stream is a common one, and presumably leaves most drivers in the intersection when the light turns red in dense traffic.
Worse: they're the only ones wanting to turn, they're past the sensor, and the next cycle is solid green only.
Huh? Even if you slam your brakes immediately when the light turns yellow, you might not stop on time if the yellow light is only on for, say, 100 milliseconds if you were close enough to the intersection.
This isn't at all as simple as you make it out to be, and the article made a pretty good point.
In my state you are permitted to enter an intersection if the light is solid yellow which is used to indicate it till soon be red. We also have recently seen an expansion of the yellow left turn signals that can be yellow while your main lane is red, meaning you can make a left turn as long as oncoming traffic permits. Those actually made things much better at many intersections.
still when I learned to drive I was told if I was turning and the first car in line that I should be in the intersection ready to turn which could mean completing the turn on red
Maybe the fines are different, not sure.
In the UK the amber means "prepare to stop" but only if you can do so safely. If you are too close to stop then you should carry on through (which should be safe as all other lights should be red at this point).
So basically it all boils down to the mood of the cops. I would say it's not frequent to be fined for a yellow (never happened to me in more than 20 years of driving) but I'm pretty sure it would fail your driving license exam.
I think (but I'm not sure) that traffic light cameras only catch red lights.
> Article R412-31 du Code de la route. Vous devez obligatoirement vous arrêter au feu orange, sauf si cela doit vous conduire à un danger.
If you cannot stop safely then you hit the pedal so that you clear the intersection asap since stopping to full stop in the middle of it is bad idea.
I'm more annoyed by the people who lay on the horn like a New York cabbie if I'm half a second late off the line (sometimes because of an obstruction they can't see).
So if anything, yellow light for turns should be shorter. If you are still in the intersection by the time the light goes red, it is probably because you had to brake hard when you realized you had to yield to someone (i.e. ped on a crosswalk going straight). In this case, you should absolutely get the ticket because all western driving codes expressly forbid entering an intersection unless you can promptly execute your turn without waiting; it is strict liability.
So sure, you go slower through an intersection when turning. But this entirely ignores that you had much more time to stop safely for the yellow light; braking distance is quadratic with speed, so the effect is even more lopsided.
In Ukraine we have 4 seconds of blinking green light before yellow, that should be more then enough to notice and slow down for full stop. But I do like much more traffic lights with number of seconds till light change (in Kharkiv almost all trafic lights are replaced with numbered one). This is incredibly usefull, cause You can notice numbers from long distance and plan route accordingly.
It's pitty that not all cities and countries go for traffic lights with timers.
For example, in 2s intervals:
Green -> Green + Yellow -> Yellow + Red -> Red
This way, you not only know from a glance how stale the yellow is, but also you get a better indication of the timing. When a light simply goes Green -> Yellow -> Red, you have no frame of reference from which to gauge how long it will stay yellow, especially since every light has different timing.
You could even go one further, using blinking lights:
Solid green -> Green + Yellow (yellow blinks 3 times), Yellow + Red (red blinks 3 times) -> Solid red
And to improve traffic startup, you could do the opposite (Red -> Red + Yellow -> Green), as is done in many European countries.
Timers on the red seem to work well though, giving people advance waning to prepare to go, get in gear etc. There is one near me that seems to help get the traffic moving through faster when the lights change.
Back then, in certain areas of the Bronx and unbeknownst to me, there were traffic lights that only had two bulbs; one was green, one was red. There was No yellow light--the green and red lights would come on simultaneously which denoted "yellow". That almost killed us.
I took that as a good lesson a few months later as I started down the path of becoming a racer, And I follow this Rule assiduously to this day (to be clear;I no longer street race But I am still Extra careful on unknown roads); make sure you KNOW the road you are on before you drive fast on it. And TBH in my street racing days I would even take a drive by first to make sure there was no construction, broken water mains, ice or whatever happening... it's one of the main reasons I'm still alive.
crossing fingers for self-driving-cars
The fact tickets were issued on the light turning red rather than the opposing light turning green should tell you all you need to know about whether this is intended to increase road safety or generate revenue.
Most accidents i've witnessed have been rear endings where a driver was not from Atlanta and stopped at a yellow.
The problem is people don't know how long the green then yellow really is, nor when it is about to change from yellow to red. I've been using crosswalk countdowns where they're available, but they aren't always reliable in my city (Phoenix). Sometimes, it will hit zero - and the light will stay green.
But most of the time, when it hits zero, it will go from green to yellow, then you have roughly 3 seconds left.
it depends a lot on the speed limit, at least where I live. the yellow light usually lasts a lot longer on a 45 mph road than a quiet 20 mph street.
I think having a countdown on the green light would be very helpful, but I worry that a countdown on the yellow light could lead to people cutting the red light even closer.
what I would really like to see in the US is a yellow light before the green so I know when it's time to put the car in gear. of course, this could also worsen the "drag strip" effect.
I'm saying this as I commute by bike, and often have to wait at a red light, with no car in sight. Some have detectors, but they often don't work on bikes (even when putting my bike on the ground, in case of inductive sensors).
If you’d like a good old fashioned website to go with your coffee break, and you are now or would like to become interested in everything one could possibly need to know about British traffic lights, may I thoroughly recommend beno’s site to you?:
Meanwhile, the rest of the world apparently considers 3 seconds to be too short. I'd be quite delighted if Boston followed suit.
Would be amusing if he sued the state in small claims for extortion and racketeering to get the ticket penalty back.
Where I live (big urban metropolis) it's completely normal and commonplace for at least 1 or 2 cars (and sometimes up to 3 or 4 cars) to pass through after the signal turned red. It seems drivers consider the yellow light to be pretty much the same as the green light.
the worse the intersection, the more it happens.
What he said to me was "Green is on top, yellow is in the middle, red is on bottom." It's such a simple answer that I was amazed I hadn't thought of it.
Red was an octagon. Yellow was a triangle. Green was a circle.