Do you mean the yellow coming on a few seconds before the red-to-green change? I grew up when that was the norm.
Traffic lights with four colors and a new white light are coming, and they will change the way we drive forever
- Thread starter TonyR
- Start date
I thought it was the other way around?
Red with yellow meant " floor it its about to go full Red"
Red with yellow meant " floor it its about to go full Red"
Wow, just think of the Money and time that will be spent converting one intersection, Three guys leaning on shovels while 1 guy on a bucket lift carries up a white light with a vise grips and electrical tape and a 1 mile backup for the lane closures. multiplied by 40,000 = All the money we need for something else.
Last edited:
Where's that at? I haven't heard of it. (It DOES sound stupid).
They are all over... Search for HAWK signal and you'll find a lot.
OK...we had similar signals mid-block on busy streets in front of fire stations to stop traffic to help get the fire trucks out of the stations more safely and more quickly. The two signal heads were just 3 section R-Y-G but the display and sequencing were almost the same (no flashing red during pedestrian clearance interval as pedestrians were not allowed to cross in front of a fire station).
But what is stupid (IMO) about these HAWK signals is this....why does the yielding vehicle driver need to see flashing reds during the pedestrian clearance interval? That's equal to a stop sign and they WILL take off and go while someone is still walking in the roadway. If the crossing was so dangerous for the pedestrians that they felt like the HAWK would mitigate that they will find out that the same type of motorists that were NOT yielding to pedestrians in the roadway BEFORE the HAWK was installed will still be encroaching on pedestrians in the roadway AFTER the HAWK is installed.
Unnecessary, IMO.
Just an FYI regarding some signals in flash at late night... until about the mid 1960's traffic signals were electro-mechanical and most of those were pre-timed and not traffic-actuated, meaning they had a synchronous clock motor making a camshaft rotate on a fixed timed cycle, opening and closing relay contacts to turn off and on the 120VAC red, yellow and green traffic lamps. They would be physically running whether there were cars or not and this caused lots of needless wear and tear on the components....motors, gears, relays, contacts, etc. It consumed electricity needlessly and accelerated burn-outs of the lamps.
The answer was to have a time clock place the signals into flashing operation during the night when most places of employment, stores, schools, churches, etc. were closed and vehicular and pedestrian traffic was very light. This cut down on maintenance and energy expenses exponentially. The arterial (main) street would see a flashing yellow for caution and the side (minor) street a flashing red for stop and proceed when clear.
It was actually designed so that the entry into AND the exit from this flashing operation would occur as the arterial would go into the yellow caution interval (the ending of the regular R-Y-G operation).
This is nice having an audience rant to....
I see over and over where these smart traffic-actuated signals retard traffic movement to the greatest extent. This happens when the traffic volume is in-between light and heavy. I'll be coming up to an intersection where it will turn red in my face, requiring a fast stop. While I'm sitting there with a totally open intersection in front of me, I'll see a car coming to the intersection with a green. Just as he gets there his signal turns red in his face, and mine shortly goes green. This happens with both oncoming and side traffic.
Another way to describe it is that the signals cause every single car going through the intersection to first come to a full stop.
Generally the poor, inefficient operation you describe is the culmination of several practices: outdated and inaccurate data collected from the various traffic sampling stations, improper implementation of that data and poor equipment maintenance.
Just like our computers, if you feed them crap data, you get crap results...the old garbage in/garbage out.
Too many agencies dial in parameters and even if they work out great initially they don't revisit the operation weeks or months and in some cases years to see how it's working. It doesn't take an engineering degree to see that traffic is very dynamic and you can't "set it and forget it" unless you want it to operate as you described and we've all seen.
And it's not just the traffic engineers that initially designed the system that are shirking their responsibilities....it's the traffic engineers that are supposed to gather the data constantly, implement the timing and settings into the local traffic controllers and system coordination systems and the field (traffic signal) technicians that insure all the hardware is doing what it's supposed to do.
Of course budget cuts can play a role in the poor execution, as well as politics and these days, even DEI policies.
I fought what I described above from '73 to '04 and it drove me nuts. I would get so frustrated because in the overwhelming number of cases if people would just do their $%#* jobs things would work so much better. I've changed somewhat since I retired in '04 but for too, too many years I would takeover where someone would drop the ball because I could usually fix it or correct it in less time than it would take to get them to do their job. There have always been and there will always be, stupid, lazy and incompetent people that collect a paycheck regularly and create work for other people. Honestly I don't see how some people get to where they are having been around them for a time and seeing how they work....some are functional morons.
Way too many of them could drop off the face of the earth for 6 months and probably they would only be missed by their dog.
</END RANT>
No. Back in the 1960's, in Boston at least, if you pressed the walk button, when the lights were supposed to change for the other direction to go, they would all turn red and yellow at the same time. So the red and the yellow lights were on for all directions. Thant meant the pedestrians would then cross the street.
