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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

This is a solved problem and it's astonishing the world hasn't just adopted the Dutch traffic engineering standards outright. It's FASTER for cars and safer for people.

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The lack of adoption of best practices from other countries is generally baffling to me. When I first visited China grim Europe and saw traffic lights with countdowns (like in the US) I thought we did immediately adopt this in Europe. Cultural inertia and lack of looking outwards is really frustrating.

A countdown on a traffic signal seems like a fun way to encourage drag racing.

Though it's nice on pedestrian signals.

Another example of "this is why we can't have nice things".

Crazy idea that would be next to politically impossible in North America: Have every traffic light with a countdown also be a speed camera.

It'd eliminate the incentive to drag race, would give drivers more information earlier allowing better driving, and would generally make speeds limits actually a limit on roads with traffic lights.

First you have to deal with the issue of cities selling camera data to third parties and using it for license plate tracking and face ID

That's a solved problem in responsible cities, say New York. The cameras only take a picture if they see someone speeding [1], and once they see someone speeding a citation is issued and that's a matter of public record [2] so there is no data to sell.

But like I said, politically impossible, there's a very strong constituency and lobby of people who like cars and like speeding and will come up with excuses for why it couldn't work. For instance New York State restricts New York City to only putting speed cameras in school zones because of that group of people.

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/speed-camera-faq....

[2] https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Open-Parking-a...

Is it a countdown until it turns green, or a countdown until it turns red? I think it's unlikely the latter would encourage drag racing.

I'd like to see both so that I can avoid coming to a full stop when it's red and on the other side of it avoid having to slam on the breaks.

The driver can usually see the countdown on the pedestrian signal anyway. It's not obvious that this would be worse.

How are countdown signal better ?

I know if I still have time to try to cross or not. Especially on wider roads it's nice not to have to worry about being in the middle when it goes red.

Research on countdown traffic lights is inconclusive with regards to their safety [0]. They can not realistically be described as best practice.

[0] https://www.maxapress.com/data/article/dts/preview/pdf/DTS-2...

Countdown signals don't work with adaptive signalling where phases are dynamically lengthened or shortened (or sometimes entirely skipped) in response to traffic flows. They especially don't work with public transport priority.

Which standards are you referring to?

They are literally referring to the "Dutch traffic engineering standards" when they say "Dutch traffic engineering standards"

What standards specifically? What is the solution to the problem that Dutch standards provide? Duh

It’s an entire book length of material, but in short, for built up areas drivers are forced through street to design to be higher alert to their surroundings. EX: chicanes in the road, speed tables, brick roads, narrow streets, small/tight turn radius, no turn on red, etc. These all work together to make a system that is amongst the safest in the world for pedestrians, and by happenstance has the happiest drivers.

Also, bike traffic and vehicle through traffic are separated on different networks, so a conflicts are minimized.

Which requires a long and detailed answer that can be found by simply googling "Dutch traffic engineering standards" which leads you to an entire wealth of information.

https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/principles-safe-road-network (national institute for road safety research)

https://crowplatform.com/product/design-manual-for-bicycle-t... (non-profit advisor to the ministry of transport)

The hard problem isn’t figuring out what to do. Its to get people on board with shifting from a like for like infrastructure development model where the roads and built environment look more or less the same for decades, to a potential status quo changing model of infrastructure development. If you can solve that fundamental issue, traffic is just a footnote of the long list of problems you also solve on our planet.

To clarify, aren't these standards mostly relevant where heavy bicycle traffic exists? Do they still apply in areas with little to no bicycle traffic? I'm assuming you're mostly referring to this famous manual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROW_Design_Manual_for_Bicycle...

There is no bicycle traffic because there are no bicycle roads. It's incorrect to claim that we shouldn't build bicycle roads because there's no bicycle traffic :)

A similar concept would be to only build airports where there's lots of planes landing.

Or arguing that a bridge shouldn't be built because people don't regularly swim across.

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