Agreed. The traffic light paradigm that I've seen popping up more often (which really bothers me) is the red left turn arrow. Light's green, no oncoming traffic; but can't make a very safe left because there's a red arrow staring back at me.
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.
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.
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.
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.