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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move.

It was wonderful.

BTW, the D community is all over the world. We schedule a zoom meeting each month. When we began the meetings, and the meeting started at, say, 8, the meeting organizer would say "we need to wait a bit for the rest to join us". I put my foot down and said when the meeting is scheduled for 8, it starts at exactly 8.

And everyone shows up on time! It's amazing how that works.

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Fun fact, all train clocks in Germany synchronize ever minute. That's why the second hand freezes every minute: its actually set to be a bit too fast, and then gets held at the top until the radio signal comes to let it continue.

https://youtu.be/Er5VIgJqvtg

German engineering!

When I worked at Boeing, we'd have a meeting now and then in a meeting room. The engineers showed up on time. The lead engineers showed up 10m late. The supervisor showed up 30m late. Anyone higher up, even later.

This was never discussed, but the pattern was the same every meeting.

I seriously disliked that nonsense.

That is why I do not like the American traffic signaling system. When the light turns red cross traffic has a two to three second delay. My feeling is that if people knew the cross traffic would go immediately when the light turned red they would certainly stop. But right now they know there's a buffer so they just run the red light.

Around here the power goes out to the lights now and then. Interestingly, the traffic flows smoother and faster without the lights! Even the arterials! It's amazing! Drivers simply politely cooperate with each other.

(The same thing happens when a traffic cop handles the intersection.)

I'm always assured that the city traffic light engineers know what they're doing and design the lights for maximum flow. They do no such thing. They are either incompetent or deliberately set things up to impede the flow of traffic.

Most of the lights now have cameras on them. Would it be so hard to connect them up to AI with the goal of "maximize throughput"? Imagine how much gas would be saved. It would be tremendous!

The Netherlands has it.

Moving to the US, the traffic light system was a big culture shock for me. No major/minor dendritic road system laid out like a tree like I was used to — more like right angles everywhere and so many delays. Traffic lights on every single intersection. So inefficient.

And when you mention it, a surprising number of people say “that would never work here. People don’t know how to drive”. So little faith!

This has been found over and over, the more traffic control devices the worse the driving.

> Interestingly, the traffic flows smoother and faster without the lights!

I agree with that at off-peak times, but when lights malfunction at peak times, that seems to make traffic a lot worse.

That's how the traffic in India actually works. No sudden moves, no surprises, no AI, everybody cooperates.

At 4-way stops I find myself incredibly frustrated at the lack of roundabouts in the US since the traffic moves so much more slowly. But for high traffic intersections traffic lights are just more efficient since they let more cars through on average.

I think much of the issue is that by solving it at one intersection you simply move the problem to the next intersection. I'm pretty sure putting a roundabout at the 280/Page Mill Road intersection would improve throughput but nobody would get to work any quicker since the choke point is the next intersection along.

That's because traffic lines exist for safety not efficiency. They guarantee a time during which you can drive through the crossing without looking, while introducing idle time.

Wouldn't you need the delay even if everyone drove perfectly? Isn't the point of it to give time for cars that have already entered the intersection to exit it, since the light turning red just means you're no longer allowed to enter?

Generally, cross drivers pay attention to other cars in the intersection and don't just drive into them.

And cars already in the intersection have a momentum, you’d need quite a powerful car to hit them (and you would have to do it on purpose)

This was the biggest culture shock for me coming from military aviation to software. In the former, a brief starts exactly on time, down to the second. "5-4-3-2-1-hack. Time is 0800."

I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.

> I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.

The problem with it is the boss. Too many bosses show their dominance by how much they can force underlings to wait for them. The boss is quite capable of starting the meetings on time, and the rest will work out.

I do the same thing with chronically late people. I simply don't wait for them. The problem resolves itself.

I've also done this. Back when I used to teach, all I had to do to get students to be on time was to start on time myself, and close the classroom door. (I think they locked automatically, so students had to knock to be let in, but that wasn't the point. I never gave them any grief, just let them in with as small an interruption as I could manage.)

I have never had a more punctual group of people that large. It works.

One thing about human nature that I rarely see mentioned is people tend to behave as you expect them to.

If you expect them to be honest, they'll be honest.

If you expect them to be thieves, they'll be thieves.

If you expect them to be on time, they'll be on time.

And so on.

(Of course there are exceptions.)

This is being "fashionably" late, you assert social status by being late.

If I'm going to be late for a social occasion, I'll text the host.

I was going to write a very snarky reply, but you seem much more experienced than me, so I thought about it a little bit. My point remains, but the snark goes away. And I'm in Germany and people wait 5 minutes before starting. In all regular seminars, people start at 5 past. It's because it is assumed that people have another meeting or seminar till the hour before. Same with meetings. Only in conferences do people start at the dot.

I think it is when systems fail, people stop responding to systems, and this is what is happening in Germany right now.

Took me a while to realize but D here refers to the D language I assume

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