Safety Feature For Pedestrians Has Undesired Consequence

I sit above a pretty busy intersection and get to witness the madness and regular accidents of rush hour traffic heading out of downtown on a daily basis.<p>I think simply shimming an extra second or of intersection clearing time between transitions would go long way towards addressing the apparent dangers of light timing.<p>Activating traffic signals and pedestrian signals simultaneously results in drivers who try to &#x27;beat&#x27; the pedestrians off the curb.<p>Activating perpendicular traffic signals too close traffic&#x2F;pedestrian signals puts the cross-traffic in danger of being hit by the people trying to time the light.<p>Add a second or two, end up with &lt;5 fewer light transitions per hour.<p>Though, on a related note, what I see cause more accidents and general bullshit than timing lights is the ridiculous amount of cellphone use that happens in motion and particularly at intersections.<p>Every day I see someone stop at the red light below me and immediately start fiddling with their phone, as the light turns green and the fiddler proceeds to hit the gas <i>irrespective</i> of what is happening in the road directly in front of them - pedestrians, gridlock, presidential motorcade only to run into something or panic stop seconds later if they&#x27;re lucky.<p>At first this seemed inexplicable...&quot;Can&#x27;t these people see?&quot;<p>Upon thinking about it, I&#x27;m guessing they actually can&#x27;t or more accurately don&#x27;t see. That the fraction of a second they have to hit the gas before getting a chorus of horns or a rear-ending is simply too short to take in even major changes in the scene in front of them.<p>Self-driving cars can&#x27;t come soon enough.

In the trade off between property dammage and pedestrian deaths I am generally going to side with pedestrians.

It is an interesting scenario that they play out in Toronto. However, this is a programmatic feature built into the traffic systems - and in the current location I live in completely different.<p>Here the countdown hits zero well before the lights shift to yellow and finally red. Perhaps Toronto needs to readjust if there is a high number of rear-ends occurring due to drivers going off of the pedestrian control devices instead of vehicle control devices.

It reduces the number of pedestrians who get hit, and asshole drivers who think they can speed though intersections are getting into accidents.<p>I don&#x27;t see the issue.

Even if we don&#x27;t get fully self-driven cars soon, I really hope we get autopilot to take over for timing left turns and yellow lights, entering a highway, avoiding pedestrians, and maybe all parking.<p>Sure, many drivers handle that all fine most of the time, but each one seems like a potential point of failure that would benefit from a little more standardization.<p>EDIT: Or traffic robots that direct instructions to proceed or stop to each specific driver. Seems like we have better options than a colored indicator involving a lot of judgment calls based on conflicting interests.

I&#x27;m having trouble understanding this article. If the count down timers show pedestrians the amount of time they have to cross the road (as they do here in London) why would the driver be watching this and think they only have a few seconds until the light goes red and they can&#x27;t get through the intersection. Surely, the opposite is the case?<p>I can see that you could potentially form a similar explanation around that scenario too but it doesn&#x27;t seem as convincing.

I like how traffic is kind of organized in Paris: Pedestrians will cross the street whenever they feel like and don&#x27;t care much about the signals. Because of that car drivers will constantly watch out for jaywalking people, drive with responsible speed and rather stop too often than being cited for reckless driving. All in all this works out extremely well and I always feel like this the safest city for a pedestrian.

It&#x27;s possible that the lowered rate of accidents involving pedestrians can at least partially be attributed to the fact that drivers can see the timers.

Good grief.. the article ends with &quot;Install them so that the pedestrians are aware of the timers but the drivers are not. And one way to do that would be to broadcast the timers via audio so that the pedestrians can hear the countdown clock go down, but drivers cannot.&quot;<p>The defacto standard in the Netherlands is that a pedestrian stop makes a loud ticking sound to aid blind people.<p>When its about to jump to red (lets call this orange) the pace increases, before going calm (not loud, and low pace) when the light is red. The orange period is -say- the time it takes an elderly lady to cross the street.<p>Here, we dont need countdown displays. People should be able look at the oncoming traffic instead.

I&#x27;d like to see a study of red light countdown timers. I have only seen them in China, but I think they are awesome. The timer tells you how long until the light turns green. If it is 30 seconds, you can check your text messages, or adjust the radio, but when it hits 3...2...1... everyone goes at the same time. I have never seen so many cars make it through an intersection in a single light cycle.<p>I have a feeling it is good for safety as well because drivers get some downtime, and a timer that lets them know when they need to be back at full attention.

Even when the intersection doesn&#x27;t have the countdown timer, I memorize the number of &quot;hand flashes&quot; before the light changes and use that to figure out if I need to speed up to get through. This is on a bike, though, so hardly life threatening. The timers are actually very convenient, especially in New York with long yellows and long 4-way reds. 1 second? More than long enough.

In this context, it&#x27;s a &quot;cheat&quot; for drivers with greater awareness, and one can&#x27;t assume the driver in front knows to accelerate. Perhaps it would be safer if the timers were installed on the drivers&#x27; traffic lights as well. I&#x27;ve seen them in China and I liked the idea. What&#x27;s stopping automobile traffic timers from being installed in the U.S.?

Can&#x27;t wait till we get self-driving cars. Next generation will find it completely reckless that we put people in charge of driving cars

Weird. I wonder if this is primarily a problem in larger, more congested cities where people tend to drive more aggressively. I live in a smaller city where we&#x27;ve had these a very long time, and they don&#x27;t seem to inspire the kind of behavior they&#x27;re talking about here. But driving here is also significantly less aggressive than somewhere like, say, Chicago.

With all this focus on self-driving cars, nobody is looking at the low-hanging fruit - cameras on the traffic lights. No, not for ticketing people, but for changing the signals in a way that maximizes flow. This will save time and an awful lot of gas. With all the sophisticated camera algorithms these days, this should be a relatively simpler problem to detect the speed, number, and distance of cars coming from each direction.<p>It can also be used to save lives - the light for the cross street need not turn green when the other turns red if there looks like a car is going to run the red. If there are pedestrians in the intersection, the lights can also remain red.

There are&#x2F;were a couple of junctions in Phnom Penh where the traffic lights for the roads have count down timers on both the green and the red. All the motorbikes started going around the 5 second mark meaning there was a good few seconds of everyone going from both directions. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s pretty dangerous, but it was fun to navigate

Seems to me they could put blinders on the crosswalk timers so they are only visible from the corner and not from the middle of the street. They already often do similar things to left turn lane arrows (so that when you aren&#x27;t turning left you don&#x27;t see green out of the corner of your eye and jump the gun).

Here in Auckland, I think we only have those countdown timers at intersections where pedestrians can cross in all directions at the same time, so there are no cars speeding up to make the light, all of the cars are stopped.

Seems like they could easily fix this by installing some kind of small plastic guard to keep most cars from seeing the countdown.

In London we have the opposite, timers for how long you are allowed to cross, this probably makes more sense.

Why can&#x27;t they just install more speed-bumps? Scientifically calibrated so that they only cause damage to cars going beyond an acceptable speed for the particular intersection in question. I used to live somewhere hoons would regularly speed by; a speed-bump was built, and it put an end to such speeding almost instantaneously as all the hoons had their vehicles&#x27; suspension destroyed.

Why don&#x27;t they just retrofit these signals so that pedestrians can see but drivers can&#x27;t?