Hacker News Reader

Comment by t0mas88 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting use of data. But some places near me have actually decided to actively make their lights timing worse, to encourage fewer cars to travel through the city.

View on HN

There's a pedestrian crossing in my city on a street with a decent amount of traffic that somewhat recently got reprogrammed to almost instantly stop cars when the pedestrian sensor is activated, and it doesn't have an internal cooldown timer. This ends up in situations where you're the tenth waiting for pedestrians at the crosswalk and you end up rolling three car spaces forward before the light turns red again because another pedestrian activated the sensor.

As a frequent pedestrian, this sounds great. A slow car is a safe car. I've often wondered why lights don't seem to be timed in cities for how long it takes to walk a block.

I've definitely experienced convenient light timing walking through San Francisco.

How long it takes who to walk a block?

> A slow car is a safe car.

A slower car is less likely to severely injure you than a faster moving car. Your safety factor has possibly improved to an unknown degree given the particular intersection, roadway configuration and angle of incident, the car has in no way "become safe."

> I've often wondered why lights don't seem to be timed in cities for how long it takes to walk a block

The energy stored in a 3000lb+ object moving 30mph is far greater than the energy in an 150lb object moving 3mph. The overhead of having to start and stop movement as a pedestrian is not comparable and won't rise to the level of design criteria the way it will for vehicles.

This is less great when the result is:

* Massive lines forming that congest multiple blocks (increasing danger to primarily car occupants, decreases throughput of public transit even with dedicated lanes) * Drivers, becoming increasingly less patient, gun forward any opportunity they have to progress (increasing danger to pedestrians) * Idling vehicles for longer periods create increased pollution (debatable, but theoretically would affect everyone)

But I'd say the biggest losers are when this impacts buses.

As opposed to most situations where the pedestrians have to stand and wait for permission to cross, normally whilst breathing in exhaust fumes.

Omfg I love this

(I don't own a car)

This is dumb. It should only changw to benefit others, not to just make it worse for you as a driver.

I live on a street that is two-way for 99% of its length and one way for the last bit ("do not enter" at that end). The purpose is to prevent drivers from using a neighborhood street as a cut-through to avoid traffic on the parkway.

It sounds like the lights timing as described is similar: make these streets less advantageous in hopes that drivers will take other streets (presumably a ring road in the upthread case).

Change*

weirdly enough i apparently live not too far from the "longest red light in the USA." it's at the intersection of the "haunted" Clinton Rd. & Rt. 23 in NJ.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com