It is 11 PM on Tuesday night. It is 65F, no clouds, no moon.
You are approaching a 3-way intersection on a rural highway in Kansas. You are on the road that passes straight through the intersection, and the other road entering the intersection is to your left. To your right is a large open field. There are some farmhouses and outbuildings around, but nothing close to the intersection. The speed limit on both roads is 45 mph. You intend to proceed straight ahead. The intersection sees heavy traffic in the day, being part of the commute into the city for a large housing development a few miles down the road to your left, but there are no cars in sight tonight.
The intersection is apparently in the process of being repaved, and there is a temporary traffic signal set up. It is red in your direction, and green for the road to your left. You pull up to the traffic signal and wait. Twenty seconds later another car pulls up behind you, also waiting for the light.
You have been here before, during the day, and you have decided that the temporary traffic signal doesn’t use any sensors in the road, and operates only a timer. You have noticed before that the cycle for the road you’re on is very slow, a factor of 2x - 3x longer than normal traffic signals that you’re accustomed to.
You can see clearly in all directions, and it is very apparent that no cars are coming on the adjacent road. You don’t see any police cars, but in your rearview mirrors you can see there are some more headlights approaching in the distance behind you. They won’t get here for a little while though.
It has been a long day. You’re getting slightly annoyed at having to sit here waiting pointlessly when there is very obviously no other traffic coming from the road to your left.
Do you run the light, or wait there until it turns green?
My calculation is something like this: it’s probably not a cop behind me, and it’s really probably not a cop car hiding in that shadow on the crossroad waiting for someone to run this oh-so-runnable red. Like, maybe, 1 in 500 chance.
Getting a ticket for running a red light is going to suck thousands of times more than waiting at a red light for an extra 2 minutes will suck.
My life’s suckage is on average lower if I wait. MORE IMPORTANTLY, there’s a certain threshold of suckage that I’ll go pretty far out of my way to avoid, and getting stopped by the cops is over that threshold.
Since I did exactly that on my vacation last week (at an obviously broken light which I waited at for 5 minutes without it changing), my answer is obviously yes.
That changes the question, though. I’m assuming we’re talking about the normal slow light described in the OP, not Shel Silverstein’s Traffic Light.
If the light’s gone a couple of minutes without changing, to the extent that I’m pretty sure it’s broken, I’ll run the light. Related question: what’s the legality of running an obviously broken light?
I’m a fairly patient person, so I’d just wait. Even if it is a longer light than usual, it’s already red by the time I get there so it’s not going to be all that long before it turns green again. The only time I’ve deliberately run a red light was at an intersection where one of the sensors was clearly broken, which is a different situation. With my luck I’d get hyper-impatient enough to run the light and there’d be a cop camped out in the dark, waiting for someone to run that light because it’s slow. Or I’d get t-boned by an idiot I couldn’t see because he was driving with his lights off, which is the kind of shit I have seen far too often.
I wouldn’t have even stopped if there was no other traffic. The purpose of stop lights is to keep cars from hitting each other. In the absence of other traffic, they are meaningless to me.
I wouldn’t run the light under the described circumstances, but it’s a matter of degree. I’ve been in a situation where I was sitting at a red light for several minutes at ~2 a.m. with no other cars in sight and in that case I ran the light. Likewise, there’s a traffic light for a bicycle crossing near my current residence and a couple of months ago I rolled through it at ~2 kph when there was no bicycles or pedestrians in sight.
In the middle of nowhere late at night? I wait as long as I expect the light to take, maybe another 10-20%, then run it slowly & carefully. Lights in the distance in any direction don’t alter my decision.
I voted yes. Seems like a high probability of not getting caught.
There are red light cameras where I live-- otherwise I’d run the 5 minute 2 am lights here regularly.
This. Also, with my luck there’s a new driver coming from one of the other directions and the passenger is goading the driver to see “how fast Mom’s car can go”.
A red light runner almost killed my wife, so I’m an absolutist about this. And favor the death penalty for this infraction.
No one gets into accidents at intersections because they see the other people coming. I’m sure the bicyclists who I’ve almost hit when they’ve run red lights and stop signs were sure no one was coming either.
Reread the OP. This is not situation where running red light from a stop is going to hurt anybody. It’s not “running” the red without stopping. The hypothetical is that the car stopped is on the cross if the tee. There is no road on the right. Cars from the left are going to have to turn either right or left, so they’ll be going slow. It’s also flat, and at night. It’s incredibly easy to see no one is coming.
The OP’s hypothetical should have been created that the car was waiting on the leg of the Tee. In that case it would be a lot more questionable to run the red.
In actual fact, the OP’s hypothetical would most likely never happen. The straight road would always get the preferred green, and the road that tee’d would have a flashing red. Then it would be nothing different than a rural stop sign intersection.
I covered that. No one thinks someone else is coming when they get into an accident. I’m aware that the scenario is that no one else is coming. In real life, you can’t know that. And if people turning left or right do it slowly, you don’t drive where I drive, where people vaguely pause when turning right on red and do it right in front of on-coming traffic.
