Why the Dutch Wait Less at Traffic Lights

Just so the North American cyclists and pedestrians don't get too depressed: it's also depressing to watch if you come from other European countries. I for one am from Germany, where the cycling/pedestrian infrastructure is undeniably better in most places, but car traffic still has top priority no matter what politicians may say. Small example: the busy S-Bahn (regional train) / U-Bahn (subway) / bus interchange at Harras in Munich (https://goo.gl/maps/doaJT4vq7viDyK9v5). The western exit of the subway station, which is under the railway underpass, had to be used also if you came from the train station and wanted to legally cross the street to get a bus on the other side - you had to go from level +1 to -1 and then back to ground level. While remodeling the area, they wanted to enable pedestrians to cross at street level too. So now you have traffic lights where pedestrians have to push a button and wait for > 30 seconds to get a green light. Which in most cases means that you have to choose between crossing despite the red light or losing your bus. So a lot of money was spent, but the stated goal of encouraging walking, cycling and using public transit was still turned into a bad joke, because the "prime directive" is still to make sure that pedestrians and cyclists inconvenience car traffic as little a possible.

> "be smart and detect actual traffic for modifying the red light behavior in real time"

This is something I've been frustrated by for years. "Autonomous Cars" are hard. Autonomous traffic lights should be much easier. Here in the suburbs there are tons of stoplight intersections between small residential neighborhoods and central arteries where cross traffic is fairly rare. There are sensors in the roadway to detect cars waiting but they are still incredibly slow to change as they seem to stick to minimum timers during most of the day. The crazy part is that one or two cars waiting to cross often wait two minutes for the apparent timer to expire and the light to change while there was no oncoming traffic the other way that would have been inconvenienced by an immediate change. The cross-traffic cycles are very short anyway because there's only a couple cars at most.

Even more perverse is the number of times I sit waiting two minutes with no approaching cross traffic in sight from either direction, then when some cars are finally approaching, then it stops them with a red so I can cross. A semi-smart system based on a Raspberry Pi-level SBC with a camera would have had me on my way while no one was coming. It seems like in the aggregate camera-based autonomous traffic lights could save enormous amounts of fuel and time.

I think you should also add a point for public transport, a bus with 30 people should not have the same priority like a car with 1 person in it. Trying to keep public transport always moving will also have other benefits.

They certainly do, but I also think it's been happening less since they started introducing these smarter traffic light systems. People are more likely to ignore a red light when they don't know why or for how long they'll be waiting.

Yes. In the Netherlands, drivers pay closer to the true cost of driving. That's a good thing. It should be higher though, to help offset the externalities that drivers cost society.